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iverett

• ' NAT/ O HAL PAPK

a MvriotfAL MotruMEtrr

THE BOOK OF
THE NATIONAL PARKS

b'rom the painting by Chris Jorgenson

ZOROASTER FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE GRAND CANYON

Nature's greatest example of stream erosion

THE BOOK OF
THE NATIONAL PARKS

ROBERT STERLING YARD

CHIEF, EDUCATIONAL DIVISION, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, DEPARTMENT

OF THE INTERIOR

AUTHOR OF "THE NATIONAL PARKS PORTFOLIO"
" THE TOP OF THE CONTINENT," ETC.

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1919

PREFACE

IN offering the American public a carefully studied
outline of its national park system, I have two prin
cipal objects. The one is to describe and differentiate
the national parks in a manner which will enable the
reader to appreciate their importance, scope, meaning,
beauty, manifold uses and enormous value to indi
vidual and nation. The other is to use these parks,
in which Nature is writing in large plain lines the
story of America's making, as examples illustrating
the several kinds of scenery, and what each kind
means in terms of world building; in other words, to
translate the practical findings of science into unscien
tific phrase for the reader's increased profit and pleas
ure, not only in his national parks but in all other
scenic places great and small.

At the outset I have been confronted with a diffi
culty because of this double objective. The role of
the interpreter is not always welcome. If I write
what is vaguely known as a "popular" book, wise
men have warned me that any scientific intrusion,
however lightly and dramatically rendered, will dis
please its natural audience. If I write the simplest
of scientific books, I am warned that a large body of
warm-blooded, wholesome, enthusiastic Americans,
the very ones above all others whose keen enjoyment

vii

viii PREFACE

I want to double by doubling their sources of pleasure,
will have none of it. The suggestion that I make my
text "popular" and carry my "science" in an appen
dix I promptly rejected, for if I cannot give the scien
tific aspects of nature their readable values in the
text, I cannot make them worth an appendix.

Now I fail to share with my advisers their poor
opinion of the taste, enterprise, and intelligence of the
wide-awake American, but, for the sake of my message,
I yield in some part to their warnings. Therefore I
have so presented my material that the miscalled,
and, I verily believe, badly slandered "average reader,"
may have his "popular" book by omitting the note on
the Appreciation of Scenery, and the several notes
explanatory of scenery which are interpolated between
groups of chapters. If it is true, as I have been told,
that the "average reader" would omit these anyway,
because it is his habit to omit prefaces and notes of
every kind, then nothing has been lost.

he keen inquiring reader, however, the reader
who wants to know values and to get, in the eloquent
phrase of the day, all that's coming to him, will have
the whole story by beginning the book with the note
on the Appreciation of Scenery, and reading it consec
utively, interpolated notes and all. As this will in
volve less than a score of additional pages, I hope to
get the message of the national parks in terms of their
fullest enjoyment before much the greater part of the
book's readers.

The pleasure of writing this book has many times

PREFACE ix

repaid its cost in labor, and any helpfulness it may
have in advancing the popularity of our national
parks, in building up the system's worth as a national
economic asset, and in increasing the people's pleasure
in all scenery by helping them to appreciate their
greatest scenery, will come to me as pure profit. It
is my earnest hope that this profit may be large.

A similar spirit has actuated the very many who
have helped me acquire the knowledge and experience
to produce it; the officials of the National Park Ser
vice, the superintendents and several rangers in the
national parks, certain zoologists of the United States
Biological Survey, the Director and many geologists
of the United States Geological Survey, scientific ex
perts of the Smithsonian Institution, and professors
in several distinguished universities. Many men have
been patient and untiring in assistance and helpful
criticism, and to these I render warm thanks for my
self and for readers who may benefit by their work. '

CONTENTS

PACK

PREFACE vii

THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 3

I. THE NATIONAL PARKS OF THE UNITED STATES 17^

THE GRANITE NATIONAL PARKS

GRANITE'S PART IN SCENERY 33

II. YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE U. . 36

III. THE PROPOSED ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK . 69

IV. THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 93

V. MCKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 118

VI. LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 132

THE VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARKS

ON THE VOLCANO IN SCENERY . 145

VII. LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 148

VIII. MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 159

DC. CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 184

X. YELLOWSTONE, A VOLCANIC INTERLUDE . . . 202

XI. THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 229

xii CONTENTS

THE SEDIMENTARY NATIONAL PARKS

PAGE

XII. ON SEDIMENTARY ROCK IN SCENERY .... 147

XIII. GLACIERED PEAKS AND PAINTED SHALES ... 251

XIV. ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE .... 284
XV. THE HEALING WATERS 305

THE GRAND CANYON AND OUR NATIONAL
MONUMENTS

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST .... 321

XVI. A PAGEANT OF CREATION 328

XVII. THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 352

•XVIII. HISTORIC MONUMENTS OF THE SOUTHWEST . . 367

XIX. DESERT SPECTACLES 385

XX. THE MUIR WOODS AND OTHER NATIONAL MON
UMENTS 404

ILLUSTRATIONS

Zoroaster from the depths of the Grand Canyon . . . Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

The Rainbow Natural Bridge, Utah 8

Middle fork of the Belly River, Glacier National Park ... 12

General Grant Tree 18

The Giant Geyser — greatest in the world 22

The Yosemite Falls — highest in the world 26

El Capitan, survivor of the glaciers 44

Half Dome, Yosemite's hooded monk 46

The climax of Yosemite National Park 56

The greatest waterwheel of the Tuolumne 56

Tehipite Dome, guardian rock of the Tehipite Valley ... 82

East Vidette from a forest of foxtail pines 84

Bull Frog Lake, proposed Roosevelt National Park .... oo

Under a giant sequoia 90

Estes Park Plateau, looking east 96

Front range of the Rockies from Bierstadt Lake 96

Summit of Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park . . no

The Andrews Glacier hangs from the Continental Divide . . 114

A Rocky Mountain cirque carved from solid granite .... 114

Mount McKinley, looming above the great Alaskan Range . 128

Archdeacon S tuck's party half-way up the mountain .... 128

The summit of Mount McKinley 128

In Lafayette National Park 134

xiii

MAPS AND DIAGRAMS

FAOE

Cross-section of Crater Lake showing probable outline of

Mount Mazama 189

Cross-section of Crater Lake 191

Map of Hawaii National Park 230

IACINO PAGE

Outline of the Mesa Verde Formation 290

Outlines of the Western and Eastern Temples, Zion National

Monument 356

AT END OF VOLUME

Map of Yosemite National Park, California.

Proposed Roosevelt National Park and the Sequoia and General
Grant National Parks, California.

The Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
Mount Rainier National Park, Washington.
Crater Lake National Park, Oregon.
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
Glacier National Park, Montana.
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona.
Zion National Monument, Utah.

THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The Book of the National Parks

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY

TO the average educated American, scenery is
a pleasing hodge-podge of mountains, valleys,
plains, lakes, and rivers. To him, the glacier-hollowed
valley of Yosemite, the stream-scooped abyss of the
Grand Canyon, the volcanic gulf of Crater Lake, the
bristling granite core of the Rockies, and the ancient
ice-carved shales of Glacier National Park all are one
— just scenery, magnificent, incomparable, meaning
less. As a people we have been content to wonder,
not to know; yet with scenery, as with all else, to
know is to begin fully to enjoy. Appreciation measures
enjoyment. And this brings me to my proposition,
namely, that we shall not really enjoy our possession
of the grandest scenery in the world until we realize
that scenery is the written page of the History of
Creation, and until we learn to read that page.

The national parks of America include areas of
the noblest and most diversified scenic sublimity easily
accessible in the world; nevertheless it is their chief est
glory that they are among the completest expressions
of the earth's history. The American people is waking
rapidly to the magnitude of its scenic possession; it
has yet to learn to appreciate it.

4 Tf IE BOOK ;<3E THE NATIONAL PARKS

Nevertheless we ioVe scenery. We are a nation
of sightseers. The year before the world war stopped
all things, we spent $286,000,000 in going to Europe.
That summer Switzerland's receipts from the sale of
transportation and board to persons coming from for
eign lands to see her scenery was $100,000,000, and
more than half, it has been stated apparently with
authority, came from America. That same year tour
ist travel became Canada's fourth largest source of
income, exceeding in gross receipts even her fisheries,
and the greater part came from the United States;
it is a matter of record that seven-tenths of the hotel
registrations in the Canadian Rockies were from south
of the border. Had we then known, as a nation, that
there was just as good scenery of its kind in the United
States, and many more kinds, we would have gone to
see that; it is a national trait to buy the best. Since
then, we have discovered this important fact and are
crowding to our national parks.

"Is it true," a woman asked me at the foot of
Yosemite Falls, "that this is the highest unbroken
waterfall in the world?"

She was the average tourist, met there by chance.
I assured her that such was the fact. I called atten
tion to the apparent deliberation of the water's fall,
a trick of the senses resulting from failure to realize
height and distance.

"To think they are the highest in the world!"
she mused.

I told her that the soft fingers of water had carved

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 5

this valley three thousand feet into the solid granite,
and that ice had polished its walls, and I estimated for
her the ages since the Merced River flowed at the level
of the cataract's brink.

"I've seen the tallest building in the world," she
replied dreamily, "and the longest railroad, and the
largest lake, and the highest monument, and the big
gest department store, and now I see tlie highest
waterfall. Just think of it !"

If one has illusions concerning the average tourist,
let him compare the hundreds who gape at the paint
pots and geysers of Yellowstone with the dozens who
exult in the sublimated glory of the colorful canyon.
Or let him listen to the table-talk of a party returned
from Crater Lake. Or let him recall the statistical
superlatives which made up his friend's last letter from
the Grand Canyon.

I am not condemning wonder, which, in its place,
is a legitimate and pleasurable emotion. As a condi
ment to sharpen and accent an abounding sense of
beauty it has real and abiding value.

Love of beauty is practically a universal passion.
It is that which lures millions into the fields, valleys,
woods, and mountains on every holiday, which crowds
our ocean lanes and railroads. The fact that few of
these rejoicing millions are aware of their own motive,
and that, strangely enough, a few even would be
ashamed to make the admission if they became aware
of it, has nothing to do with the fact. It's a wise
man that knows his own motives. The fact that still

6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

fewer, whether aware or not of the reason of their hap
piness, are capable of making the least expression of
it, also has nothing to do with the fact. The tourist
woman whom I met at the foot of Yosemite Falls may
have felt secretly suffocated by the filmy grandeur of
the incomparable spectacle, notwithstanding that she
was conscious of no higher emotion than the cheap
wonder of a superlative. The Grand Canyon's rim
is the stillest crowded place I know. I've stood
among a hundred people on a precipice and heard the
whir of a bird's wings in the abyss. Probably the
majority of those silent gazers were suffering some
thing akin to pain at their inability to give vent to
the emotions bursting within them.

I believe that the statement can not be success
fully challenged that, as a people, our enjoyment of
scenery is almost wholly emotional. Love of beauty
spiced by wonder is the equipment for enjoyment of
the average intelligent traveller of to-day. Now add
to this a more or less equal part of the intellectual
pleasure of comprehension and you have the equip
ment of the average intelligent traveller of to-morrow.
To hasten this to-morrow is one of the several objects
of this book.

To see in the carved and colorful depths of the
Grand Canyon not only the stupendous abyss whose
terrible beauty grips the soul, but also to-day's chap
ter in a thrilling story of creation whose beginning lay
untold centuries back in the ages, whose scene covers
three hundred thousand square miles of our wonder-

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 7

ful southwest, whose actors include the greatest forces
of nature, whose tremendous episodes shame the
imagination of Dore, and whose logical end invites
suggestions before which finite minds shrink — this is
to come into the presence of the great spectacle prop
erly equipped for its enjoyment. But how many who
see the Grand Canyon get more out of it than merely
the beauty that grips the soul?

So it is throughout the world of scenery. The
geologic story written on the cliffs of Crater Lake is
more stupendous even than the glory of its indigo
bowl. The war of titanic forces described in simple
language on the rocks of Glacier National Park is un
excelled in sublimity in the history of mankind. The
story of Yellowstone's making multiplies many times
the thrill occasioned by its world-famed spectacle.
Even the simplest and smallest rock details often tell
thrilling incidents of prehistoric times out of which
the enlightened imagination reconstructs the romances
and the tragedies of earth's earlier days.

How eloquent, for example, was the small, water-
worn fragment of dull coal we found on the limestone
slope of one of Glacier's mountains ! Impossible com
panionship ! The one the product of forest, the other
of submerged depths. Instantly I glimpsed the dis
tant age when thousands of feet above the very spot
upon which I stood, but then at sea level, bloomed a
Cretaceous forest, whose broken trunks and matted
foliage decayed in bogs where they slowly turned to
coal; coal which, exposed and disintegrated during

8 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

intervening ages, has long since — all but a few small
fragments like this — washed into the headwaters of
the Saskatchewan to merge eventually in the muds of
Hudson Bay. And then, still dreaming, my mind
leaped millions of years still further back to lake bot
toms where, ten thousand feet below the spot on
which I stood, gathered the pre-Cambrian ooze which
later hardened to this very limestone. From ooze a
score of thousand feet, a hundred million years, to
coal ! And both lie here together now in my palm !
Filled thus with visions of a perspective beyond hu
man comprehension, with what multiplied intensity
of interest I now returned to the noble view from
Gable Mountain !

In pleading for a higher understanding of Nature's
method and accomplishment as a precedent to study
and observation of our national parks, I seek enor
mously to enrich the enjoyment not only of these
supreme examples but of all examples of world making.
The same readings which will prepare you to enjoy
to the full the message of our national parks will in
vest your neighborhood hills at home, your creek and
river and prairie, your vacation valleys, the landscape
through your car window, even your wayside ditch,
with living interest. I invite you to a new and fas
cinating earth, an earth interesting, vital, personal,
beloved, because at last known and understood !

It requires no great study to know and under
stand the earth well enough for such purpose as this.
One does not have to dim his eyes with acres of maps,

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 9

or become a plodding geologist, or learn to distinguish
schists from granites, or to classify plants by table,
or to call wild geese and marmots by their Latin
names. It is true that geography, geology, physi
ography, mineralogy, botany and zoology must each
contribute their share toward the condition of intelli
gence which will enable you to realize appreciation of
Nature's amazing earth, but the share of each is so
small that the problem will be solved, not by exhaus
tive study, but by the selection of essential parts.
Two or three popular books which interpret natural
science in perspective should pleasurably accomplish
your purpose. But once begun, I predict that few will
fail to carry certain subjects beyond the mere essen
tials, while some will enter for life into a land of new
delights.

Let us, for illustration, consider for a moment
the making of America. The earth, composed of
countless aggregations of matter drawn together from
the skies, whirled into a globe, settled into a solid mass
surrounded by an atmosphere carrying water like a
sponge, has reached the stage of development when
land and sea have divided the surface between them,
and successions of heat and frost, snow, ice, rain, and
flood, are busy with their ceaseless carving of the land.
Already mountains are wearing down and sea bottoms
are building up with their refuse. Sediments carried
by the rivers are depositing in strata, which some day
will harden into rock.

We are looking now at the close of the era which

io THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

geologists call Archean, because it is ancient beyond
knowledge. A few of its rocks are known, but not well
enough for many definite conclusions. All the earth's
vast mysterious past is lumped under this title.

The definite history of the earth begins with the
close of the dim Archean era. It is the lapse from then
till now, a few hundred million years at most out of
all infinity, which ever can greatly concern man, for
during this tune were laid the only rocks whose read
ing was assisted by the presence of fossils. During
this time the continents attained their final shape,
the mountains rose, and valleys, plains, and rivers
formed and re-formed many times before assuming
the passing forms which they now show. During this
time also life evolved from its inferred beginnings in
the late Archean to the complicated, finely developed,
and in man's case highly mentalized and spiritualized
organization of To-day.

Surely the geologist's field of labor is replete with
interest, inspiration, even romance. But because it
has become so saturated with technicality as to be
come almost a popular bugaboo, let us attempt no
special study, but rather cull from its voluminous
records those simple facts and perspectives which will
reveal to us this greatest of all story books, our old
earth, as the volume of enchantment that it really is.

With the passing of the Archean, the earth had
not yet settled into the perfectly balanced sphere
which Nature destined it to be. In some places the
rock was more compactly squeezed than in others,

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY n

and these denser masses eventually were forced vio
lently into neighbor masses which were not so tightly
squeezed. These movements far below the surface
shifted the surface balance and became one of many
complicated and little known causes impelling the
crust here to slowly rise and there to slowly fall. Thus
in places sea bottoms lifted above the surface and
became land, while lands elsewhere settled and be
came seas. There are areas which have alternated
many times between land and sea; this is why we find
limestones which were formed hi the sea overlying
shales which were formed in fresh water, which in
turn overlie sandstones which once were beaches — all
these now in plateaus thousands of feet above the
ocean's level.

Sometimes these mysterious internal forces lifted
the surface in long waves. Thus mountain chains
and mountain systems were created. Often their
summits, worn down by frosts and rains, disclose the
core of rock which, ages before, then hot and fluid,
had underlain the crust and bent it upward into moun
tain form. Now, cold and hard, these masses are dis
closed as the granite of to-day's landscape, or as other
igneous rocks of earth's interior which now cover
broad surface areas, mingled with the stratified or
water-made rocks which the surface only produces.
But this has not always been the fate of the under-
surface molten rocks, for sometimes they have burst
by volcanic vents clear through the crust of earth,
where, turned instantly to pumice and lava by release

12 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

from pressure, they build great surface cones, ccrtfer
broad plains and fill basins and valleys.

Thus were created the three great divisions of the
rocks which form the three great divisions of scenery,
the sediments, the granites, and the lavas.

During these changes in the levels of enormous
surface areas, the frosts and water have been indus
triously working down the elevations of the land.
Nature forever seeks a level. The snows of winter,
melting at midday, sink into the rocks' minutest cracks.
Expanded by the frosts, the imprisoned water pries
open and chips the surface. The rains of spring and
summer wash the chippings and other debris into
rivulets, which carry them into mountain torrents,
which rush them into rivers, which sweep them into
oceans, which deposit them for the upbuilding of the
bottoms. Always the level! Thousands of square
miles of California were built up from ocean's bottom
with sediments chiselled from the mountains of Wy
oming, Colorado, and Utah, and swept seaward through
the Grand Canyon.

These mills grind without rest or pause. The
atmosphere gathers the moisture from the sea, the
winds roll it in clouds to the land, the mountains catch
and chill the clouds, and the resulting rains hurry
back to the sea in rivers bearing heavy freights of soil.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter, day and night, the
mills of Nature labor unceasingly to produce her level.
If ever this earth is really finished to Nature's liking,
it will be as round and polished as a billiard ball.

From a photograph by Bailey Willis

MIDDLE FORK OF THE BELLY RIVER, GLACIER NATIONAL PARK

Very ancient shales and limestone fantastically carved by glaciers. The illustration shows
Glenns Lake, Pyramid Peak, Chancy Glacier, and Mount Kipp

ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 13

Years mean nothing in the computation of the
prehistoric past. Who can conceive a thousand cen
turies, to say nothing of a million years? Yet either
is inconsiderable against the total lapse of time even
from the Archean's close till now.

And so geologists have devised an easier method
of count, measured not by units of time, but by what
each phase of progress has accomplished. This meas
ure is set forth in the accompanying table, together
with a conjecture concerning the lapse of time in terms
of years.

The most illuminating accomplishment of the
table, however, is its bird's-eye view of the procession
of the evolution of life from the first inference of its
existence to its climax of to-day; and, concurrent with
this progress, its suggestion of the growth and devel
opment of scenic America. It is, in effect, the table
of contents of a volume whose thrilling text and stu
pendous illustration are engraved immortally in the
rocks; a volume whose ultimate secrets the scholar
ship of all time perhaps will never fully decipher, but
whose dramatic outlines and many of whose most
thrilling incidents are open to all at the expense of a
little study at home and a little thoughtful seeing in
the places where the facts are pictured in lines so big
and graphic that none may miss their meanings.

Man's colossal egotism is rudely shaken before the
Procession of the Ages. Aghast, he discovers that the
billions of years which have wrought this earth from
star dust were not merely God's laborious preparation

14 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

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ON THE APPRECIATION OF SCENERY 15

of a habitation fit for so admirable an occupant; that
man, on the contrary, is nothing more or less than the
present master tenant of earth, the highest type of
hundreds of millions of years of succeeding tenants
only because he is the latest in evolution.

Who can safely declare that the day will not come
when a new Yellowstone, hurled from reopened vol
canoes, shall found itself upon the buried ruin of the
present Yellowstone; when the present Sierra shall
have disappeared into the Pacific and the deserts of
the Great Basin become the gardens of the hemi
sphere; when a new Rocky Mountain system shall
have grown upon the eroded and dissipated granites
of the present; when shallow seas shall join anew Hud
son Bay with the Gulf of Mexico; when a new and
lofty Appalachian Range shall replace the rounded
summits of to-day; when a race of beings as superior
to man, intellectually and spiritually, as man is supe
rior to the ape, shall endeavor to reconstruct a picture

NOTE EXPLANATORY OF THE ESTIMATE OF GEOLOGIC TIME IN THE
TABLE ON THE OPPOSITE PAGE

The general assumption of modern geologists is that a hundred million
years have elapsed since the close of the Archean period; at least this is
a round number, convenient for thinking and discussion. The recent
tendency has been greatly to increase conceptions of geologic time over
the highly conservative estimates of a few years ago, and a strong disposition
is shown to regard the Algonkian period as one of very great length, ex
tremists even suggesting that it may have equalled all time since. For the
purposes of this popular book, then, let us conceive that the earth has
existed for a hundred million years since Archean times, and that one-third
of this was Algonkian; and let us apportion the two- thirds remaining
among succeeding eras in the average of the proportions adopted by Pro
fessor Joseph Barrell of Yale University, whose recent speculations upon
geologic time have attracted wide attention.

16 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

of man from the occasional remnants which floods
may wash into view?

Fantastic, you may say. It is fantastic. So far
as I know there exists not one fact upon which definite
predictions such as these may be based. But also
there exists not one fact which warrants specific denial
of predictions such as these. And if any inference
whatever may be made from earth's history it is the
inevitable inference that the period in which man
lives is merely one step in an evolution of matter,
mind and spirit which looks forward to changes as
mighty or mightier than those I have suggested.

With so inspiring an outline, the study to which
I invite you can be nothing but pleasurable. Space
does not permit the development of the theme in the
pages which follow, but the book will have failed if it
does not, incidental to its main purposes, entangle the
reader in the charm of America's adventurous past.

THE NATIONAL PARKS OF THE UNITED STATES

THE National Parks of the United States are
areas of supreme scenic splendor or other unique
quality which Congress has set apart for the pleasure
and benefit of the people. At this writing they num
ber eighteen, sixteen of which lie within the boun
daries of the United States and are reached by rail
and road. Those of greater importance have excel
lent roads, good trails, and hotels or hotel camps, or
both, for the accommodation of visitors; also public
camp grounds where visitors may pitch their own
tents. Outside the United States there are two na
tional parks, one enclosing three celebrated volcanic
craters, the other conserving the loftiest mountain on
the continent.

The starting point for any consideration of our
national parks necessarily is the recently realized fact
of their supremacy in world scenery. It was the sen
sational force of this realization which intensely at
tracted public attention at the outset of the new
movement; many thousands hastened to see these
wonders, and their reports spread the tidings through
out the land and gave the movement its increasing
impetus.

i8 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The simple facts are these:

The Swiss Alps, except for several unmatchable
individual features, are excelled in beauty, sublimity
and variety by several of our own national parks, and
these same parks possess other distinguished individual
features unrepresented in kind or splendor in the Alps.

The Canadian Rockies are more than matched in
rich coloring by our Glacier National Park. Glacier
is the Canadian Rockies done in Grand Canyon
colors. It has no peer.

The Yellowstone outranks by far any similar vol
canic area in the world. It contains more and greater
geysers than all the rest of the world together; the
next in rank are divided between Iceland and New
Zealand. Its famous canyon is alone of its quality of
beauty. Except for portions of the African jungle,
the Yellowstone is probably the most populated wild
animal area in the world, and its wild animals are
comparatively fearless, even sometimes friendly.

Mount Rainier has a single-peak glacier system
whose equal has not yet been discovered. Twenty-
eight living glaciers, some of them very large, spread,
octopus-like, from its centre. It is four hours by
rail or motor from Tacoma.

Crater Lake is the deepest and bluest accessible
lake in the world, occupying the hole left after one of
our largest volcanoes had slipped back into earth's
interior through its own rim.

Yosemite possesses a valley whose compelling
beauty the world acknowledges as supreme. The

GENERAL GRANT TREE
It has a National Park all to itself

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 19

valley is the centre of eleven hundred square miles of
high altitude wilderness.

The Sequoia contains more than a million sequoia
trees, twelve thousand of which are more than ten
feet in diameter, and some of which are the largest
and oldest living things in the wide world.

The Grand Canyon of Arizona is by far the
hugest and noblest example of erosion in the world.
It is gorgeously carved and colored. In sheer sub
limity it offers an unequalled spectacle.

Mount McKinley stands more than 20,000 feet
above sea level, and 17,000 feet above the surrounding
valleys. Scenically, it is the world's loftiest moun
tain, for the monsters of the Andes and the Himalayas
which surpass it in altitude can be viewed closely only
from valleys from five to ten thousand feet higher
than McKinley's northern valleys.

The Hawaii National Park contains the fourth
greatest dead crater in the world, the hugest living
volcano, and the Kilauea Lake of Fire, which is unique
and draws visitors from the world's four quarters.

These are the principal features of America's
world supremacy. They are incidental to a system of
scenic wildernesses which in combined area as well as
variety exceed the combined scenic wilderness play
grounds of similar class comfortably accessible else
where. No wonder, then, that the American public
is overjoyed with its recently realized treasure, and
that the Government looks confidently to the rapid
development of its new-found economic asset, The

20 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

American public has discovered America, and no one
who knows the American public doubts for a moment
what it will do with it.

The idea still widely obtains that our national
parks are principally playgrounds. A distinguished
member of Congress recently asked: "Why make these
appropriations? More people visited Rock Creek
Park here in the city of Washington last Sunday after
noon than went to the Yosemite all last summer.
The country has endless woods and mountains which
cost the Treasury nothing/'

This view entirely misses the point. The na
tional parks are recreational, of course. So are state,
county and city parks. So are resorts of every kind.
So are the fields, the woods, the seashore, the open
country everywhere. We are living in an open-air
age. The nation of outdoor livers is a nation of
power, initiative, and sanity. I hope to see the time
when available State lands everywhere, when every
square mile from our national forest reserve, when
even many private holdings are made accessible and
comfortable, and become habited with summer tramp-
ers and campers. It is the way to individual power
and national efficiency.

But the national parks are far more than recrea
tional areas. They are the supreme examples. They
are the gallery of masterpieces. Here the visitor en
ters in a holier spirit. Here is inspiration. They are

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 21

also the museums of the ages. Here nature is still
creating the earth upon a scale so vast and so plain that
even the dull and the frivolous cannot fail to see and
comprehend.

This is no distinction without a difference. The
difference is so marked that few indeed even of those
who visit our national parks in a frivolous or merely
recreational mood remain in that mood. The spirit
of the great places brooks nothing short of silent rever
ence. I have seen men unconsciously lift their hats.
The mind strips itself of affairs as one sheds a coat.
It is the hour of the spirit. One returns to daily liv
ing with a springier step, a keener vision, and a broader
horizon for having worshipped at the shrine of the
Infinite.

Ill

The Pacific Coast Expositions of 1915 marked the
beginning of the nation's acquaintance with its na
tional parks. In fact, they were the occasion, if not
the cause, of the movement for national parks devel
opment which found so quickly a country-wide re
sponse, and which is destined to results of large im
portance to individual and nation alike. Because
thousands of those whom the expositions were ex
pected to draw westward would avail of the oppor
tunity to visit national parks, Secretary Lane, to
whom the national parks suggested neglected oppor
tunity requiring business experience to develop, in
duced Stephen T. Mather, a Chicago business man with

22 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

mountain-top enthusiasms, to undertake their prepa
ration for the unaccustomed throngs. Mr. Mather's
vision embraced a correlated system of superlative
scenic areas which should become the familiar play
grounds of the whole American people, a system which,
if organized and administered with the efficiency of a
great business, should even become, in time, the ren
dezvous of the sightseers of the world. He foresaw
in the national parks a new and great national eco
nomic asset.

The educational and other propaganda by which
this movement was presented to the people, which
the writer had the honor to plan and execute, won
rapidly the wide support of the public. To me the
national parks appealed powerfully as the potential
museums and classrooms for the popular study of the
natural forces which made, and still are making,
America, and of American fauna and flora. Here
were set forth, in fascinating picture and lines so plain
that none could fail to read and understand, the essen
tials of sciences whose real charm our rapid educa
tional methods impart to few. This book is the logi
cal outgrowth of a close study of the national parks,
beginning with the inception of the new movement,
from this point of view.

How free from the partisan considerations com
mon in governmental organization was the birth of the
movement is shown by an incident of Mr. Mather's
inauguration into his assistant secretaryship. Secre
tary Lane had seen him at his desk and had started

THE GIANT GEYSER— GREATEST IN THE WORLD
Yellowstone National Park

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 23

back to his own room. But he returned, looked in at
the door, and asked:

"Oh, by the way, Steve, what are your politics?"

This book considers our national parks as they
line up four years after the beginning of this move
ment. It shows them well started upon the long road
to realization, with Congress, Government, and the
people united toward a common end, with the schools
and the universities interested, and, for the first time,
with the railroads, the concessioners, the motoring in
terests, and many of the public-spirited educational
and outdoor associations all pulling together under the
inspiration of a recognized common motive.

Of course this triumph of organization, for it is
no less, could not have been accomplished nearly so
quickly without the assistance of the closing of Europe
by the great war. Previous to 1915, Americans had
been spending $300,000,000 a year in European
travel. Nor could it have been accomplished at all
if investigation and comparison had not shown that
our national parks excel in supreme scenic quality
and variety the combined scenery which is comfort
ably accessible in all the rest of the world together.

To get the situation at the beginning of our book
into full perspective, it must be recognized that, pre
vious to the beginning of our propaganda in 1915, the
national parks, as such, scarcely existed in the public
consciousness. Few Americans could name more than
two or three of the fourteen existing parks. The
Yosemite Valley and the Yellowstone alone were gen-

24 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

erally known, but scarcely as national parks; most of
the school geographies which mentioned them at all
ignored their national character. The advertising
folders of competing railroads were the principal
sources of public knowledge, for few indeed asked for
the compilation of rates and charges which the Gov
ernment then sent in response to inquiries for infor
mation. The parks had practically no administra
tion. The business necessarily connected with their
upkeep and development was done by clerks as minor
and troublesome details which distracted attention
from more important duties; there was no one clerk
whose entire concern was with the national parks.
The American public still looked confidently upon the
Alps as the supreme scenic area in the world, and
hoped some day to see the Canadian Rockies.

Originally the motive in park-making had been
unalloyed conservation. It is as if Congress had said:
"Let us lock this up where no one can run away with
it; we don't need it now, but some day it may be valu
able." That was the instinct that led to the reser
vation of the Hot Springs of Arkansas in 1832, the
first national park. Forty years later, when official
investigation proved the truth of the amazing tales
of Yellowstone's natural wonders, it was the instinct
which led to the reservation of that largely unex
plored area as the second national park. Seventeen
years after Yellowstone, when newspapers and sci-

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 25

entific magazines recounted the ethnological impor
tance of the Casa Grande Ruin in Arizona, it resulted
in the creation of the third national park, notwith
standing that the area so conserved enclosed less than
a square mile, which contained nothing of the kind
and quality which to-day we recognize as essential
to parkhood. This closed what may be regarded as
the initial period of national parks conservation. It
was wholly instinctive; distinctions, objectives, and
policies were undreamed of.

Less than two years after Casa Grande, which,
by the way, has recently been re-classed a national
monument, what may be called the middle period
began brilliantly with the creation, in 1890, of the
Yosemite, the Sequoia, and the General Grant National
Parks, all parks in the true sense of the word, and all
of the first order of scenic magnificence. Nine years
later Mount Rainier was added, and two years after
that wonderful Crater Lake, both meeting fully the
new standard.

What followed was human and natural. The
term national park had begun to mean something in
the neighborhoods of the parks. Yellowstone and
Yosemite had long been household words, and the
introduction of other areas to their distinguished
company fired local pride in neighboring states. " Why
should we not have national parks, too?" people
asked. Congress, always the reflection of the popular
will, and therefore not always abreast of the moment,
was unprepared with reasons. Thus, during 1903 and

26 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

1904, there were added to the list areas in North
Dakota, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, which were
better fitted for State parks than for association with
the distinguished company of the nation's noblest.

A reaction followed and resulted in what we may
call the modern period. Far-sighted men in and out
of Congress began to compare and look ahead. No
hint yet of the splendid destiny of our national parks,
now so clearly defined, entered the minds of these
men at this time, but ideas of selection, of develop
ment and utilization undoubtedly began to take form.
At least, conservation, as such, ceased to become a
sole motive. Insensibly Congress, or at least a few
men of vision in Congress, began to take account of
stock and figure on realization.

This healthy growth was helped materially by
the public demand for the improvement of several of
the national parks. No thought of appropriating
money to improve the bathing facilities of Hot Springs
had affected Congressional action for nearly half a
century; it was enough that the curative springs had
been saved from private ownership. Yellowstone
was considered so altogether extraordinary, however,
that Congress began in 1879 to appropriate yearly for
its approach by road, and for the protection of its
springs and geysers; but this was because Yellow
stone appealed to the public sense of wonder. It
took twenty years more for Congress to understand
that the public sense of beauty was also worth appro -
priations. Yosemite had been a national park for

From a photograph by Pillsbury

THE YOSEMITE FALLS— HIGHEST IN THE WORLD
From the brink of the upper falls to the foot of the lower falls is almost half a mile

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 27

nine years before it received a dollar, and then only
when public demand for roads, trails, and accommoda
tions became insistent.

But, once born, the idea took root and spread.
It was fed by the press and magazine reports of the
glories of the newer national parks, then attracting
some public attention. It helped discrimination in
the comparison of the minor parks created in 1903
and 1904 with the greater ones which had preceded.
The realization that the parks must be developed at
public expense sharpened Congressional judgment as
to what areas should and should not become national
parks.

From that time on Congress has made no mis
takes in selecting national parks. Mesa Verde be
came a park in 1905, Glacier in 1910, Rocky Moun
tain in 1915, Hawaii and Lassen Volcanic in 1916,
Mount McKinley in 1917, and Lafayette and the
Grand Canyon in 1919. From that time on Congress,
most conservatively, it is true, has backed its judg
ment with increasing appropriations. And in 1916 it
created the National Park Service, a bureau of the
Department of the Interior, to administer them in
accordance with a definite policy.

The distinction between the national forests and
the national parks is essential to understanding. The
national forests constitute an enormous domain ad-

28 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ministered for the economic commercialization of the
nation's wealth of lumber. Its forests are handled
scientifically with the object of securing the largest
annual lumber output consistent with the proper con
servation of the future. Its spirit is commercial.
The spirit of national park conservation is exactly
opposite. It seeks no great territory — only those few
spots which are supreme. It aims to preserve nature's
handiwork exactly as nature made it. No tree is cut
except to make way for road, trail or hotel to enable
the visitor to penetrate and live among nature's
secrets. Hunting is excellent in some of our national
forests, but there is no game in the national parks; in
these, wild animals are a part of nature's exhibits;
they are protected as friends.

It follows that forests and parks, so different in
spirit and purpose, must be handled wholly separately.
Even the rangers and scientific experts have objects
so opposite and different that the same individual
cannot efficiently serve both purposes. High specializa
tion in both services is essential to success.

Another distinction which should be made is the
difference between a national park and a national
monument. The one is an area of size created by
Congress upon the assumption that it is a supreme
example of its kind and with the purpose of develop
ing it for public occupancy and enjoyment. The other
is made by presidential proclamation to conserve an
area or object which is historically, ethnologically, or
scientifically important. Size is not considered, and

NATIONAL PARKS OF UNITED STATES 29

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30 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

development is not contemplated. The distinction is
often lost in practice. Casa Grande is essentially a
national monument, but had the status of a national
park until 1918. The Grand Canyon, from every
point of view a national park, was created a national
monument and remained such until 1919.

THE GRANITE NATIONAL PARKS

GRANITE'S PART IN SCENERY

THE granite national parks are Yosemite, Sequoia,
including the proposed Roosevelt Park, General
Grant, Rocky Mountain, and Mount McKinley. Gran
ite, as its name denotes, is granular in texture and ap
pearance. It is crystalline, which means that it is
imperfectly crystallized. It is composed of quartz, feld
spar, and mica in varying proportions, and includes
several common varieties which mineralogists dis
tinguish scientifically by separate names.

Because of its great range and abundance, its
presence at the core of mountain ranges where it is
uncovered by erosion, its attractive coloring, its mas-
siveness and its vigorous personality, it figures impor
tantly in scenery of magnificence the world over. In
color granite varies from light gray, when it shines
like silver upon the high summits, to warm rose or
dark gray, the reds depending upon the proportion of
feldspar in its composition.

It produces scenic effects very different indeed
from those resulting from volcanic and sedimentary
rocks. While it bulks hugely in the higher moun
tains, running to enormous rounded masses below the
level of the glaciers, and to jagged spires and pin
nacled walls upon the loftiest peaks, it is found also
in many regions of hill and plain. It is one of our
commonest American rocks.

34 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Much of the loftiest and noblest scenery of the
world is wrought in granite. The Alps, the Andes,
and the Himalayas, all of which are world-celebrated
for their lofty grandeur, are prevailingly granite.
They abound in towering peaks, bristling ridges, and
terrifying precipices. Their glacial cirques are girt
with fantastically toothed and pinnacled walls.

This is true of all granite ranges which are lofty
enough to maintain glaciers. These are, in fact, the
very characteristics of Alpine, Andean, Himalayan,
Sierran, Alaskan, and Rocky Mountain summit land
scape. It is why granite mountains are the favorites
of those daring climbers whose ambition is to equal
established records and make new ones; and this in
turn is why some mountain neighborhoods become so
much more celebrated than others which are quite as
fine, or finer — because, I mean, of the publicity given
to this kind of mountain climbing, and of the unwar
ranted assumption that the mountains associated with
these exploits necessarily excel others in sublimity.
As a matter of fact, the accident of fashion has even
more to do with the fame of mountains than of men.

But by no means all granite mountains are lofty.
The White Mountains, for example, which parallel our
northeastern coast, and are far older than the Rockies
and the Sierra, are a low granite range, with few of the
characteristics of those mountains which lift their
heads among the perpetual snows. On the contrary,
they tend to rounded forested summits and knobby
peaks. This results in part from a longer subjection

GRANITE'S PART IN SCENERY 35

of the rock surface to the eroding influence of successive
frosts and rains than is the case with high ranges which
are perpetually locked in frost. Besides, the ice sheets
which planed off the northern part of the United States
lopped away their highest parts.

There are also millions of square miles of eroded
granite which are not mountains at all. These tend
to rolling surfaces.

The scenic forms assumed by granite will be better
appreciated when one understands how it enters land
scape. The principal one of many igneous rocks, it
is liquefied under intense heat and afterward cooled
under pressure. Much of the earth's crust was once
underlaid by granites in a more or less fluid state.
When terrific internal pressures caused the earth's
crust to fold and make mountains, this liquefied gran
ite invaded the folds and pushed close up under the
highest elevations. There it cooled. Thousands of
centuries later, when erosion had worn away these
mountain crests, there lay revealed the solid granite
core which frost and glacier have since transformed
into the bristling ramparts of to-day's landscape.

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, MIDDLE EASTERN CALIFORNIA.
AREA, 1,125 SQUARE MILES

F I^HE first emotion inspired by the sight of Yosem-
A ite is surprise. No previous preparation makes
the mind ready for the actual revelation. The hard
est preliminary reading and the closest study of
photographs, even familiarity with other mountains
as lofty, or loftier, fail to dull one's first astonishment.

Hard on the heels of astonishment comes realiza
tion of the park's supreme beauty. It is of its own
kind, without comparison, as individual as that of the
Grand Canyon or the Glacier National Park. No
single visit will begin to reveal its sublimity; one
must go away and return to look again with rested
eyes. Its devotees grow in appreciative enjoyment
with repeated summerings. Even John Muir, life stu
dent, interpreter, and apostle of the Sierra, confessed
toward the close of his many years that the Valley's
quality of loveliness continued to surprise him at each
renewal.

And lastly comes the higher emotion which is
born of knowledge. It is only when one reads in

these inspired rocks the stirring story of their making

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 37

that pleasure reaches its fulness. The added joy of
the collector upon finding that the unsigned canvas,
which he bought only for its beauty, is the lost work
of a great master, and was associated with the romance
of a famous past is here duplicated. Written history
never was more romantic nor more graphically told
than that which Nature has inscribed upon the walls
of these vast canyons, domes and monoliths in a lan
guage which man has learned to read.

The Yosemite National Park lies on the western
slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California,
nearly east of San Francisco. The snowy crest of the
Sierra, bellying irregularly eastward to a climax among
the jagged granites and gale-swept glaciers of Mount
Lyell, forms its eastern boundary. From this the park
slopes rapidly thirty miles or more westward to the
heart of the warm luxuriant zone of the giant sequoias.
This slope includes in its eleven hundred and twenty-
five square miles some of the highest scenic examples
in the wide gamut of Sierra grandeur. It is impossible
to enter it without exaltation of spirit, or describe it
without superlative.

A very large proportion of Yosemite's visitors see
nothing more than the Valley, yet no consideration is
tenable which conceives the Valley as other than a
small part of the national park. The two are insepara
ble. One does not speak of knowing the Louvre who

38 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

has seen only the Venus de Milo, or St. Mark's who has
looked only upon its horses.

Considered as a whole, the park is a sagging plain
of solid granite, hung from Sierra's saw-toothed crest,
broken into divides and transverse mountain ranges,
punctured by volcanic summits, gashed and bitten by
prehistoric glaciers, dotted near its summits with
glacial lakes, furrowed by innumerable cascading
streams which combine in singing rivers, which, in
turn, furrow greater canyons, some of majestic depth
and grandeur. It is a land of towering spires and am
bitious summits, serrated cirques, enormous isolated
rock masses, rounded granite domes, polished granite
pavements, lofty precipices, and long, shimmering
waterfalls.

Bare and gale-ridden near its crest, the park de
scends in thirty miles through all the zones and grada
tions of animal and vegetable life through which one
would pass in travelling from the ice-bound shores of
the Arctic Ocean the continent's length to Mariposa
Grove. Its tree sequence tells the story. Above
timber-line there are none but inch-high willows and
flat, piney growths, mingled with tiny arctic flowers,
which shrink in size with elevation; even the sheltered
spots on Lyell's lofty summit have their colored lichens,
and their almost microscopic bloom. At timber-line,
low, why shrubs interweave their branches to defy
the gales, merging lower down into a tangle of many
stunted growths, from which spring twisted pines and
contorted spruces, which the winds curve to leeward

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 39

or bend at sharp angles, or spread in full development
as prostrate upon the ground as the mountain lion's
skin upon the home floor of his slayer.

Descending into the great area of the Canadian
zone, with its thousand wild valleys, its shining lakes,
its roaring creeks and plunging rivers, the zone of the
angler, the hiker, and the camper-out, we enter forests
of various pines, of silver fir, hemlock, aged hump
backed juniper, and the species of white pine which
Californians wrongly call tamarack.

This is the paradise of outdoor living; it almost
never rains between June and October. The forests
fill the valley floors, thinning rapidly as they climb the
mountain slopes; they spot with pine green the broad,
shining plateaus, rooting where they find the soil,
leaving unclothed innumerable glistening areas of
polished uncracked granite; a striking characteristic
of Yosemite uplands. From an altitude of seven or
eight thousand feet, the Canadian zone forests begin
gradually to merge into the richer forests of the Transi
tion zone below. The towering sugar pine, the giant
yellow pine, the Douglas fir, and a score of decidu
ous growths — live oaks, bays, poplars, dogwoods,
maples — begin to appear and become more frequent
with descent, until, two thousand feet or more below,
they combine into the bright stupendous forests where,
in specially favored groves, King Sequoia holds his
royal court.

Wild flowers, birds, and animals also run the
gamut of the zones. Among the snows and alpine

40 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

flowerets of the summits are found the ptarmigan
and rosy finch of the Arctic circle, and in the summit
cirques and on the shores of the glacial lakes whistles
the mountain marmot.

The richness and variety of wild flower life in
all zones, each of its characteristic kind, astonishes
the visitor new to the American wilderness. Every
meadow is ablaze with gorgeous coloring, every copse
and sunny hollow, river bank and rocky bottom, be
comes painted in turn the hue appropriate to the
changing seasons. Now blues prevail in the kaleido
scopic display, now pinks, now reds, now yellows.
Experience of other national parks will show that the
Yosemite is no exception; all are gardens of wild
flowers.

The Yosemite and the Sequoia are, however, the
exclusive possessors among the parks of a remarkably
showy flowering plant, the brilliant, rare, snow-plant.
So luring is the red pillar which the snow-plant lifts a
foot or more above the shady mould, and so easily is
it destroyed, that, to keep it from extinction, the gov
ernment fines covetous visitors for every flower picked.

The birds are those of California — many, prolific,
and songful. Ducks raise their summer broods fear
lessly on the lakes. Geese visit from their distant
homes. Cranes and herons fish the streams. Every
tree has its soloist, every forest its grand chorus. The
glades resound with the tapping of woodpeckers. The
whirr of startled wings accompanies passage through
every wood. To one who has lingered in the forests

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 41

to watch and to listen, it is hard to account for the
wide-spread fabie that the Yosemite is birdless. No
doubt, happy talkative tourists, in companies and
regiments, afoot and mounted, drive bird and beast
alike to silent cover — and comment on the lifeless
forests. "The whole range, from foothill to summit,
is shaken into song every summer," wrote John Muir,
to whom birds were the loved companions of a life
time of Sierra summers, "and, though low and thin in
winter, the music never ceases."

There are two birds which the unhurried traveller
will soon know well. One is the big, noisy, gaudy
Clark crow, whose swift flight and companionable
squawk are familiar to all who tour the higher levels.
The other is the friendly camp robber, who, with
encouragement, not only will share your camp luncheon,
but will gobble the lion's share.

Of the many wild animals, ranging in size from
the great, powerful, timid grizzly bear, now almost
extinct here, whose Indian name, by the way, is yo-
semite, to the tiny shrew of the lowlands, the most fre
quently seen are the black or brown bear, and the
deer, both of which, as compared with their kind in
neighborhoods where hunting is permitted, are unterri-
fied if not friendly. Notwithstanding its able pro
tection, the Yosemite will need generations to recover
from the hideous slaughter which, in a score or two of
years, denuded America of her splendid heritage of
wild animal life.

Of the several carnivora, the coyote alone is occa-

42 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

sionally seen by visitors. Wolves and mountain lions,
prime enemies of the deer and mountain sheep, are
hard to find, even when officially hunted in the winter
with dogs trained for the purpose.

The Yosemite Valley is the heart of the national
park. Not only is it the natural entrance and abiding
place, the living-room, so to speak, the central point
from winch all parts of the park are most comfortably
accessible; it is also typical in some sense of the
Sierra as a whole, and is easily the most beautiful
valley in the world.

It is difficult to analyze the quality of the Valley's
beauty. There are, as Muir says, "many Yosemites"
in the Sierra. The Hetch Hetchy Valley, in the north
ern part of the park, which bears the same relation to
the Tuolumne River that the Yosemite Valley bears
to the Merced, is scarcely less in size, richness, and the
height and magnificence of its carved walls. Scores
of other valleys, similar except for size, abound north
and south, which are, scientifically and in Muir's
meaning, Yosemites; that is, they are pauses in their
rivers* headlong rush, once lakes, dug by rushing
waters, squared and polished by succeeding glaciers,
chiselled and ornamented by the frosts and rains which
preceded and followed the glaciers. Muir is right, for
all these are Yosemites; but he is wrong, for there is
only one Yosemite.

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 43

It is not the giant monoliths that establish the
incomparable Valley's world supremacy; Hetch Hetchy,
Tehipite, Kings, and others have their giants, too. It
is not its towering, perpendicular, serrated walls;
the Sierra has elsewhere, too, an overwhelming exhibit
of titanic granite carvings. It is not its waterfalls,
though these are the highest, by far, in the world, nor
its broad, peaceful bottoms, nor its dramatic vistas,
nor the cavernous depths of its tortuous tributary
canyons. Its secret is selection and combination.
Like all supremacy, Yosemite's lies in the inspired
proportioning of carefully chosen elements. Herein
is its real wonder, for the more carefully one analyzes
the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, the more difficult
it is to conceive its ensemble the chance of Nature's
functioning rather than the master product of supreme
artistry.

Entrance to the Yosemite by train is from the
west, by automobile from east and west both. From
whatever direction, the Valley is the first objective, for
the hotels are there. It is the Valley, then, which we
must see first. Nature's artistic contrivance is ap
parent even hi the entrance. The train-ride from the
main line at Merced is a constant up-valley progress,
from a hot, treeless plain to the heart of the great,
cool forest. Expectation keeps pace. Changing to
automobile at El Portal, one quickly enters the park.
A few miles of forest and behold — the Gates of the
Valley. El Capitan, huge, glistening, rises upon the
left, 3,000 feet above the valley floor. At first _sight

44 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

its bulk almost appalls. Opposite upon the right
Cathedral Rocks support the Bridal Veil Fall, shim
mering, filmy, a fairy thing. Between them, in the
distance, lies the unknown.

Progress up the valley makes constantly for cli
max. Seen presently broadside on, El Capitan bulks
double, at least. Opposite, the valley bellies. Cathe
dral Rocks and the mediaeval towers known as Cathe
dral Spires, are enclosed in a bay, which culminates in
the impressive needle known as Sentinel Rock — all
richly Gothic. Meantime the broadened valley, an
other strong contrast in perfect key, delightfully
alternates with forest and meadow, and through it the
quiet Merced twists and doubles like a glistening snake.
And then we come to the Three Brothers.

Already some notion of preconception has pos
sessed the observer. It could not have been chance
which set off the filmy Bridal Veil against El Capitan's
bulk; which designed the Gothic climax of Sentinel
Rock; which wondrously proportioned the consecutive
masses of the Three Brothers; which made El Capitan,
now looked back upon against a new background, a
new and appropriate creation, a thing of brilliance and
beauty instead of bulk, mighty of mass, powerful in
shape and poise, yet mysteriously delicate and unreal.
As we pass on with rapidly increasing excitement to
the supreme climax at the Valley's head, where gather
together Glacier Point, Yosemite Falls of unbelievable
height and graciousness, the Royal Arches, manifestly
a carving, the gulf-like entrances of Tenaya and the

From a photograph by J . T. Boysen

EL CAPITAN, SURVIVOR OF THE GLACIERS

Looking eastward up the Yosemite Valley, Half Dome is seen on the right horizon

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 45

Merced Canyons, and above all, and pervading all,
the distinguished mysterious personality of Half
Dome, presiding priest of this Cathedral of Beauty,
again there steals over us the uneasy suspicion of su
preme design. How could Nature have happened
upon the perfect composition, the flawless technique,
the divine inspiration of this masterpiece of more than
human art? Is it not, in fact, the master temple of
the Master Architect?

To appreciate the Valley we must consider cer
tain details. It is eight miles long, and from half a
mile to a mile wide. Once prehistoric Lake Yosemite,
its floor is as level as a ball field, and except for occa
sional meadows, grandly forested. The sinuous Mer
ced is forested to its edges in its upper reaches, but
lower down occasionally wanders through broad,
blooming opens. The rock walls are dark pearl-hued
granite, dotted with pines wherever clefts or ledges
exist capable of supporting them; even El Capitan
carries its pine-tree half way up its smooth precipice.
Frequently the walls are sheer; they look so every
where. The valley's altitude is 4,000 feet. The walls
rise from 2,000 to 6,000 feet higher; the average is a
little more than 3,000 feet above the valley floor;
Sentinel Dome and Mount Watkins somewhat exceed
4,000 feet; Half Dome nearly attains 5,000 feet;
Cloud's Rest soars nearly 6,000 feet.

Two large trench-like canyons enter the valley
at its head, one on either side of Half Dome. Tenaya
Canyon enters from the east in line with the valley,

46 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

looking as if it were the Valley's upper reach. Merced
Canyon enters from the south after curving around the
east and south sides of Half Dome. Both are ex
tremely deep. Half Dome's 5,000 feet form one side
of each canyon; Mount Watkin's 4,300 feet form the
north side of Tenaya Canyon, Glacier Point's 3,200
feet the west side of Merced Canyon. Both canyons
are superbly wooded at their outlets, and lead rapidly
up to timber-line. Both carry important trails from
the Valley floor to the greater park above the rim.

To this setting add the waterfalls and the scene
is complete. They are the highest in the world.
Each is markedly individualized; no two resemble
each other. Yet, with the exception of the Vernal
Fall, all have a common note; all are formed of com
paratively small streams dropping from great heights;
all are wind-blown ribbons ending in clouds of mist.
They are so distributed that one or more are visible
from most parts of the Valley and its surrounding
rim. More than any other feature, they differentiate
and distinguish the Yosemite.

The first of the falls encountered, Bridal Veil, is a
perfect example of the valley type. A small stream
pouring over a perpendicular wall drops six hundred
and twenty feet into a volume of mist. The mist, of
course, is the bridal veil. How much of the water
reaches the bottom as water is a matter of interesting
speculation. This and the condensed mists reach the
river through a delta of five small brooks. As a spec
tacle the Bridal Veil Fall is unsurpassed. The deli-

From a photograph by J. T. Boy sen

HALF DOME, YOSEMITE'S HOODED MONK

Rising nearly four thousand feet above the valley floor; the view is up Tenaya Canyon to the

High Sierra

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 47

cacy of its beauty, even in the high water of early
summer, is unequalled by any waterfall I have seen.
A rainbow frequently gleams like a colored rosette in
the massed chiffon of the bride's train. So pleasing
are its proportions that it is difficult to believe the fall
nearly four times the height of Niagara.

The Ribbon Fall, directly opposite Bridal Veil, a
little west of El Capitan, must be mentioned because
for a while in early spring its sixteen hundred foot drop
is a spectacle of remarkable grandeur. It is merely
the run of a snowfield which disappears in June.
Thereafter a dark perpendicular stain on the cliff
marks its position. Another minor fall, this from the
south rim, is that of Sentinel Creek. It is seen from
the road at the right of Sentinel Rock, dropping five
hundred feet in one leap of several which aggregate
two thousand feet.

Next in progress come Yosemite Falls, loftiest by
far in the world, a spectacle of sublimity. These falls
divide with Half Dome the honors of the upper Valley.
The tremendous plunge of the Upper Fall, and the
magnificence of the two falls in apparent near continua
tion as seen from the principal points of elevation on
the valley floor, form a spectacle of extraordinary dis
tinction. They vie with Yosemite's two great rocks,
El Capitan and Half Dome, for leadership among the
individual scenic features of the continent.

The Upper Fall pours over the rim at a point
nearly twenty-six hundred feet above the valley floor.
Its sheer drop is fourteen hundred and thirty feet, the

48 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

equal of nine Niagaras. Two-fifths of a mile south of
its foot, the Lower Fall drops three hundred and twenty
feet more. From the crest of the Upper Fall to the
foot of the Lower Fall lacks a little of half a mile.
From the foot of the Lower Fall, after foaming down
the talus, Yosemite Creek, seeming a ridiculously small
stream to have produced so monstrous a spectacle,
slips quietly across a half mile of level valley to lose
itself in the Merced.

From the floods of late May when the thunder of
falling water fills the valley and windows rattle a mile
away, to the October drought when the slender ribbon
is little more than mist, the Upper Yosemite Fall is a
thing of many moods and infinite beauty. Seen from
above and opposite at Glacier Point, sideways and more
distantly from the summit of Cloud's Rest, straight
on from the valley floor, upwards from the foot of the
Lower Fall, upwards again from its own foot, and
downwards from the overhanging brink toward which
the creek idles carelessly to the very step-off of its
fearful leap, the Fall never loses for a moment its
power to amaze. It draws and holds the eye as the
magnet does the iron.

Looking up from below one is fascinated by the
extreme leisureliness of its motion. The water does
not seem to fall; it floats; a pebble dropped alongside
surely would reach bottom in half the time. Speculat
ing upon this appearance, one guesses that the air re
tards the water's drop, but this idea is quickly dis
pelled by the observation that the solid inner body

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 49

drops no faster than the outer spray. It is long be
fore the wondering observer perceives that he is the
victim of an illusion; that the water falls normally;
that it appears to descend with less than natural speed
only because of the extreme height of the fall, the eye
naturally applying standards to which it has been
accustomed in viewing falls of ordinary size.

On windy days the Upper Fall swings from the
brink like a pendulum of silver and mist. Back and
forth it lashes like a horse's tail. The gusts lop off
puffy clouds of mist which dissipate in air. Muir tells
of powerful winter gales driving head on against the
cliff, which break the fall in its middle and hold it in
suspense. Once he saw the wind double the fall back
over its own brink. Muir, by the way, once tried to
pass behind the Upper Fall at its foot, but was nearly
crushed.

By contrast with the lofty temperamental Upper
Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy.
In such company, for both are always seen together,
it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the
height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most
conspicuous features, these gigantic falls seem to ap
peal even more to the imagination than to the sense
of beauty. El Capitan, on the other hand, suggests
majesty, order, proportion, and power; it has its many
devotees. Half Dome suggests mystery; to many
it symbolizes worship. Of these three, Half Dome
easily is the most popular.

Three more will complete the Valley's list of nota-

50 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ble waterfalls. All of these lie up the Merced Canyon.
Illilouette, three hundred and seventy feet in height,
enters from the west, a frothing fall of great beauty,
hard to see. Vernal and Nevada Falls carry the Mer
ced River over steep steps in its rapid progress from the
upper levels to the valley floor. The only exception
to the valley type, Vernal Fall, which some consider
the most beautiful of all, and which certainly is the
prettiest, is a curtain of water three hundred and seven
teen feet high, and of pleasing breadth. The Nevada
Fall, three-fifths of a mile above, a majestic drop of
nearly six hundred feet, shoots watery rockets from
its brink. It is full-run, powerful, impressive, and
highly individualized. With many it is the favorite
waterfall of Yosemite.

In sharp contrast with these valley scenes is the
view from Glacier Point down into the Merced and
Tenaya Canyons, and out over the magical park
landscape to the snow-capped mountains of the High
Sierra. Two trails lead from the valley up to Glacier
Point, and high upon the precipice, three thousand
feet above the valley floor, is a picturesque hotel; it
is also reached by road. Here one may sit at ease on
shady porches and overlook one of the most extended,
varied and romantic views in the world of scenery.
One may take dinner on this porch and have sunset
served with dessert and the afterglow with coffee.

Here again one is haunted by the suggestion of
artistic intention, so happy is the composition of this
extraordinary picture. The foreground is the dark,

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 51

tremendous gulf of Merced Canyon, relieved by the
silver shimmer of Vernal and Nevada Falls. From
this in middle distance rises, in the centre of the can
vas, the looming tremendous personality of Half
Dome, here seen in profile strongly suggesting a monk
with outstretched arms blessing the valley at close of
day. Beyond stretches the horizon of famous, snowy,
glacier-shrouded mountains, golden in sunset glow.

Ill

Every summer many thousands of visitors gather
in Yosemite. Most of them, of course, come tourist-
fashion, to glimpse it all in a day or two or three. A
few thousands come for long enough to taste most of
it, or really to see a little. Fewer, but still increasingly
many, are those who come to live a little with Yosemite;
among these we find the lovers of nature, the poets,
the seers, the dreamers, and the students.

Living is very pleasant in the Yosemite. The
freedom from storm during the long season, the dry
warmth of the days and the coldness of the nights, the
inspiration of the surroundings and the completeness
of the equipment for the comfort of visitors make it
extraordinary among mountain resorts. There is a
hotel in the Valley, and another upon the rim at
Glacier Point. There are three large hotel-camps in
the Valley, where one may have hotel comforts under
canvas at camp prices. Two of these hotel-camps
possess swimming pools, dancing pavilions, tennis

52 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

courts electrically lighted for night play, hot and cold-
water tubs and showers, and excellent table service.
One of the hotel-camps, the largest, provides evening
lectures, song services, and a general atmosphere sug
gestive of Chatauqua. Still a third is for those who
prefer quiet retirement and the tradition of old-
fashioned camp life.

Above the valley rim, besides the excellent hotel
upon Glacier Point, there are at this writing hotel-
camps equipped with many hotel comforts, including
baths, at such outlying points as Merced Lake and
Tenaya Lake; the former centring the mountain
climbing and trout fishing of the stupendous region on
the southwest slope of the park, and the latter the
key to the entire magnificent region of the Tuolumne.
These camps are reached by mountain trail, Tenaya
Lake Camp also by motor road. The hotel-camp sys
tem is planned for wide extension as growing demand
warrants. There are also hotels outside park limits
on the south and west which connect with the park
roads and trails.

The roads, by the way, are fair. Three enter from
the west, centring at Yosemite Village in the Valley;
one from the south by way of the celebrated Mariposa
Grove of giant sequoias; one from El Portal, terminus
of the Yosemite Railway; and one from the north,
by way of several smaller sequoia groves, connecting
directly with the Tioga Road.

Above the valley rim and north of it, the Tioga
Road crosses the national park and emerges at Mono

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 53

Lake on the east, having crossed the Sierra over Tioga
Pass on the park boundary. The Tioga Road, which
was built in 1881, on the site of the Mono Trail, to
connect a gold mine west of what has since become the
national park with roads east of the Sierra, was pur
chased in 1915 by patriotic lovers of the Yosemite and
given to the Government. The mine having soon
failed, the road had been impassable for many years.
Repaired with government money it has become the
principal highway of the park and the key to its future
development. The increase in motor travel to the
Yosemite from all parts of the country which began
the summer following the Great War, has made this
gift one of growing importance. It affords a new
route across the Sierra.

But hotels and hotel-camps, while accommodat
ing the great majority of visitors, by no means shelter
all. Those who camp out under their own canvas are
likely to be Yosemite's most appreciative devotees.
The camping-out colony lives in riverside groves in
the upper reaches of the Valley, the Government assign
ing locations without charge. Many families make
permanent summer homes here, storing equipment
between seasons in the village. Others hire equip
ment complete, from tents to salt-cellars, on the spot.
Some who come to the hotels finish the season under
hired canvas, and next season come with their own.
An increasing number come in cars, which they keep
in local garages or park near their canvas homes.

Living is easy and not expensive in these camp

54 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

homes. Mid-day temperatures are seasonable, and
nights are always cool. As it does not rain, tents are
concessions to habit; many prefer sleeping under the
trees. Markets in the village supply meats, vegetables,
milk, bread, and groceries at prices regulated by Gov
ernment, and deliver them at your kitchen tent.
Shops furnish all other reasonable needs. It is not
camping out as commonly conceived; you are living
at home on the banks of the Merced, under the morn
ing shadow of Half Dome, and within sight of Yosemite
Falls.

From these Valley homes one rides into the High
Sierra on horses hired from the government conces
sioner, tours to the Tuolumne Meadows or the Mari-
posa Grove by automobile, wanders long summer after
noons in the Valley, climbs the great rocks and domes,
picnics by moonlight under the shimmering falls or
beneath the shining tower of El Capitan, explores fa
mous fishing waters above the rim, and, on frivolous
evenings, dances or looks at motion pictures at the
greater hotel-camps.

No wonder that camp homes in the Yosemite are
growing in popularity.

The trail traveller finds the trails the best in the
country, and as good as the best in the world; they are
the models for the national system. Competent guides,
horses, supplies, and equipment are easy to hire at
regulated prices in the village.

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 55

As for the field, there is none nobler or more varied
in the world. There are dozens of divides, scores of
towering, snow-splashed peaks, hundreds of noble val
leys and shining lakes, thousands of cascading streams,
great and small, from whose depths fighting trout rise
to the cast fly. There are passes to be crossed which
carry one through concentric cirques of toothed gran
ite to ridges from which the High Sierra spreads before
the eye a frothing sea of snowy peaks.

Such a trip is that through Tuolumne Meadows
up Lyell Canyon to its headwaters, over the Sierra at
Donohue Pass, and up into the birth chambers of
rivers among the summit glaciers of Lyell and McClure
— a never-to-be-forgotten journey, which may be con
tinued, if one has time and equipment, down the John
Muir Trail to Mount Whitney and the Sequoia Na
tional Park. Or one may return to the park by way
of Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake, a wonder
spot, and thence north over Parker and Mono Passes;
trips like these produce views as magnificent as the
land possesses.

Space does not permit even the suggestion of the
possibilities to the trail traveller of this wonderland
above the rim. It is the summer playground for a
nation.

Second in magnificence among the park valleys is
Hetch Hetchy, the Yosemite of the north. Both are
broad, flowered and forested levels between lofty gran
ite walls. Both are accented by gigantic rock per
sonalities. Kolana Rock, which guards Hetch Hetchy

56 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

at its western gateway as El Capitan guards Yosemite,
must be ranked in the same class. Were there no
Yosemite Valley, Hetch Hetchy, though it lacks the
distinction which gives Yosemite Valley its world
wide fame, would be much better known than it now
is — a statement also true about other features of the
national park.

Hetch Hetchy is now being dammed below Ko-
lana Rock to supply water for San Francisco. The
dam will be hidden from common observation, and the
timber lands to be flooded will be cut so as to avoid
the unsightliness usual with artificial reservoirs in
forested areas. The reservoir will cover one of the
most beautiful bottoms in America. It will destroy
forests of luxuriance. It will replace these with a long
sinuous lake, from which sheer Yosemite-like granite
walls will rise abruptly two or three thousand feet.
There will be places where the edges are forested.
Down into this lake from the high rim will cascade
many roaring streams.

The long fight in California, in the press of the
whole country, and finally in Congress, between the
advocates of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and the de
fenders of the scenic wilderness is one of the stirring
episodes in the history of our national parks. At this
writing, time enough has not yet passed to heal the
wounds of battle, but at least we may look calmly at
what remains. One consideration, at least, affords a
little comfort. Hetch Hetchy was once, in late pre
historic times, a natural lake of great nobility. The

From a photograph by J. T. Boy sen

THE CLIMAX OF YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
Mount Lyell and its glacier from Lyell Fork

THE GREATEST WATERWHEEL OF THE TUOLUMNE

It is fifty feet in height and seventy-five feet long; Yosemite National Park

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 57

remains of Nature's dam, not far from the site of man's,
are plain to the geologist's eye. It is possible that,
with care in building the dam and clearing out the
trees to be submerged, this restoration of one of Na
ture's noble features of the past may not work out so
inappropriately as once we feared.

The Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, through
which the river descends from the level of the Tuo
lumne Meadows almost five thousand feet to the Hetch
Hetchy Valley, possesses real Yosemite grandeur.
Much of this enormous drop occurs within a couple of
amazing miles west of the California Falls. Here the
river slips down sharply tilted granite slopes at breath
less speed, breaking into cascades and plunging over
waterfalls at frequent intervals. It is a stupendous
spectacle which few but the hardiest mountaineers
saw previous to 1918, so steep and difficult was the
going. During that season a trail was opened which
makes accessible to all one of the most extraordinary
examples of plunging water in the world.

The climax of this spectacle is the Waterwheels.
Granite obstructions in the bed of the steeply tilted
river throw solid arcs of frothing water fifty feet in
air. They occur near together, singly and in groups.

The fine camping country south of the Yosemite
Valley also offers its sensation. At its most southern
point, the park accomplishes its forest climax in the

58 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Mariposa Grove. This group of giant sequoias (Se
quoia washingtoniana) ranks next, in the number and
magnificence of its trees, to the Giant Forest of the
Sequoia National Park and the General Grant grove.

The largest tree of the Mariposa Grove is the
Grizzly Giant, which has a diameter of twenty-nine
feet, a circumference of sixty-four feet, and a height
of two hundred and four feet. One may guess its age
from three thousand to thirty-two hundred years. It
is the third in size and age of living sequoias; General
Sherman, the largest and oldest, has a diameter of
thirty-six and a half feet, and General Grant a diam
eter of thirty-five feet, and neither of these, in all
probability, has attained the age of four thousand
years. General Sherman grows in the Sequoia Na
tional Park, seventy miles or more south of Yosemite;
General Grant has a little national park of its own a
few miles west of Sequoia.

The interested explorer of the Yosemite has so
far enjoyed a wonderfully varied sequence of sur
prises. The incomparable valley with its towering
monoliths and extraordinary waterfalls, the High
Sierra with its glaciers, serrated cirques and sea of
snowy peaks, the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne
with its cascades, rushing river and frothing Water-
wheels, are but the headliners of a long catalogue of
the unexpected and extraordinary. It only remains, to
complete. this new tale of the Arabian Nights, to make
one's first visit to the sequoias of Mariposa Grove.
The first sight of the calm tremendous columns which

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 59

support the lofty roof of this forest temple provokes a
new sensation. Unconsciously the visitor removes his
hat and speaks his praise in whispers.

The sequoias are considered at greater length in
the chapter describing the Sequoia National Park,
which was created especially to conserve and exhibit
more than a million of these most interesting of trees.
It will suffice here to say that their enormous stems
are purplish red, that their fine, lace-like foliage hangs
in splendid heavy plumes, that their enormous limbs
crook at right angles, the lowest from a hundred to a
hundred and fifty feet above the ground, and that all
other trees, even the gigantic sugar pine and Douglas
fir, are dwarfed in their presence. Several of the
sequoias of the Mariposa grove approach three hun
dred feet in height. The road passes through the trunk

of one.

The human history of the Yosemite is quickly
told. The country north of the Valley was known
from early times by explorers and trappers who used
the old Mono Indian Trail, now the Tioga Road, which
crossed the divide over Mono Pass. But, though the
trail approached within a very few miles of the north
rim of the Yosemite Valley, the valley was not discov
ered till 1851, when Captain Boling of the Mariposa
Battalion, a volunteer organization for the protection
of settlers, entered it from the west in pursuit of In
dians who had raided mining settlements in the foot
hills.

60 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

These savages were known as the Yosemite or
Grizzly Bear Indians. Tenaya, their chief, met their
pursuers on the uplands and besought them to come
no further. But Captain Boling pushed on through
the heavy snows, and on March 21, entered the valley,
which proved to be the Indians' final stronghold.
Their villages, however, were deserted.

The original inhabitants of the Valley were called
the Ahwahneechees, the Indian name for the Valley
being Ahwahnee, meaning a deep grassy canyon. The
Ahwahneechees, previous to Captain Boling's expedi
tion, had been decimated by war and disease. The
new tribe, the Yosemites, or Grizzly Bears, was made
up of their remainder, with Monos and Piutes added.

Captain Boling's report of the beauty of the val
ley having been questioned, he returned during the
summer to prove his assertions to a few doubters.
Nevertheless, there were no further visitors until 1853,
when Robert B. Stinson of Mariposa led in a hunt
ing-party. Two years later J. M. Hutchings, who was
engaged in writing up the beauties of California for
the California Magazine, brought the first tourists;
the second, a party of sixteen, followed later the same
year.

Pleasure travel to the Yosemite Valley may be
said to have commenced with 1856, the year the first
house was built. This house was enlarged in 1858 by
Hite and Beardsley and used for a hotel. Sullivan
and Cushman secured it for a debt the following year,
and it was operated in turn by Peck, Longhurst, and

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 61

Hutchings until 1871. Meantime J. C. Lamon set
tled in 1860, the first actual resident of the valley, an
honor which he did not share with others for four
years.

The fame of the valley spread over the country
and in 1864 Congress granted to the State of Cali
fornia "the Cleft or Gorge of the Granite Peak of
the Sierra Nevada Mountains" known as the Yo-
semite Valley, with the understanding that all income
derived from it should be spent for improving the
reservation or building a road to it. The Mariposa
Big Tree Grove was also granted at the same time.
California carefully fulfilled her charge. The Yo-
semite Valley became world-famous, and in 1890 the
Yosemite National Park was created.

VII

The Yosemite's geological history is much more
thrilling. Everyone who sees it asks, How did Nature
make the Yosemite Valley? Was it split by earth
convulsions or scooped by glacier? Few ask what
part was played by the gentle Merced.

The question of Yosemite's making has busied
geologists from Professor Whitney of the University
of California, who first studied the problem, down to
F. E. Matthes, of the United States Geological Survey,
whose recent exhaustive studies have furnished the
final solution. Professor Whitney maintained that
glaciers never had entered the valley; he did not even

62 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

consider water erosion. At one time he held that the
valley was simply a cleft or rent in the earth's crust.
At another time he imagined it formed by the sudden
dropping back of a large block in the course of the
convulsions that resulted in the uplift of the Sierra
Nevada. Galen Clark, following him, carried on his
idea of an origin by force. Instead of the walls being
cleft apart, however, he imagined the explosion of
close-set domes of molten rock the riving power, but
conceived that ice and water erosion finished the job.
With Clarence King the theory of glacial origin began
its long career. John Muir carried this theory to its
extreme.

Since the period of Muir's speculations, the tre
mendous facts concerning the part played by erosion
in the modification of the earth's surface strata have
been developed. Beginning with W. H. Turner, a
group of Yosemite students under the modern influence
worked upon the theory of the stream-cut valley modi
fied by glaciers. The United States Geological Sur
vey then entered the field, and Matthes's minute in
vestigations followed; the manuscript of his mono
graph has helped me reconstruct the dramatic past.

The fact is that the Yosemite Valley was cut from
the solid granite nearly to its present depth by the
Merced River; before the glaciers arrived, the river-
cut valley was twenty-four hundred feet deep opposite
El Capitan, and three thousand feet deep opposite
Eagle Peak. The valley was then V-shaped, and the
present waterfalls were cascades; those which are now

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 63

the Yosemite Falls were eighteen hundred feet deep,
and those of Sentinel Creek were two thousand feet
deep. All this in pre-glacial times.

Later on the glaciers of several successive epochs
greatly widened the valley, and measurably deepened
it, making it U-shaped. The cascades then became
waterfalls.

But none will see the Yosemite Valley and its
cavernous tributary canyons without sympathizing
a little with the early geologists. It is difficult to
imagine a gash so tremendous cut into solid granite
by anything short of force. One can think of it gouged
by massive glaciers, but to imagine it cut by water is
at first inconceivable.

To comprehend it we must first consider two
geological facts. The first is that no dawdling mod
ern Merced cut this chasm, but a torrent considerably
bigger; and that this roaring river swept at tremendous
speed down a sharply tilted bed, which it gouged
deeper and deeper by friction of the enormous masses
of sand and granite fragments which it carried down
from the High Sierra. The second geological fact is
that the Merced and Tenaya torrents sand-papered
the deepening beds of these canyons day and night
for several million years; which, when we remember
the mile-deep canyons which the Colorado River and
its confluents cut through a thousand or more miles
of Utah and Arizona, is not beyond human credence,
if not conception.

But, objects the sceptical, the Merced couldn't

64 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

keep always tilted; in time it would cut down to a
level and slow up; then the sand and gravel it was
carrying would settle, and the stream stop its digging.
Again, if the stream-cut valley theory is correct, why
isn't every Sierra canyon a Yosemite?

Let us look for the answer in the Sierra's history.

The present Sierra Nevada is not the first moun
tain chain upon its site. The granite which underlay
the folds of the first Sierra are still disclosed in the
walls of the Yosemite Valley. The granites which
underlay the second and modern Sierra are seen in the
towering heights of the crest.

Once these mountains overran a large part of
our present far west. They formed a level and very
broad and high plateau; or, more accurately, they
tended to form such a plateau, but never quite suc
ceeded, because its central section kept caving and
sinking in some of its parts as fast as it lifted in others.
Finally, in the course, perhaps, of some millions of
years, the entire central section settled several thou
sand feet lower than its eastern and western edges;
these edges it left standing steep and high. This
sunken part is the Great Basin of to-day. The re
maining eastern edge is the Wasatch Mountains; the
remaining western edge is the Sierra. That is why
the Sierra's eastern front rises so precipitously from
the deserts of the Great Basin, while its western side
slopes gradually toward the Pacific.

But other crust changes accompanied the sinking
of the Great Basin. The principal one was the rise,

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 65

in a series of upward movements, of the remaining
crest of the Sierra. These movements may have corre
sponded with the sinkings of the Great Basin; both
were due to tremendous internal readjustments. And
of course, whenever the Sierra crest lifted, it tilted
more sharply the whole granite block of which it was
the eastern edge. These successive tiltings are what
kept the Merced and Tenaya channels always so
steeply inclined that, for millions of years, the streams
remained torrents swift enough to keep on sand
papering their beds.

The first of these tiltings occurred in that far age
which geologists call the Cretaceous. It was incon
siderable, but enough to hasten the speed of the streams
and establish general outlines for all time. About the
middle of the Tertiary Period volcanic eruptions
changed all things. Nearly all the valleys except the
Yosemite became filled with lava. Even the crest of
the range was buried a thousand feet in one place.
This was followed by a rise of the Sierra Crest a couple
of thousand feet, and of course a much sharper tilting
of the western slopes. The Merced and Tenaya Rivers
must have rushed very fast indeed during the many
thousand years that followed.

The most conservative estimate of the duration
of the Tertiary Period is four or five million years, and
until its close volcanic eruptions continued to fill
valleys with lava, and the Great Basin kept settling,
and the crest of the Sierra went on rising; and with
each lifting of the crest, the tilt of the rivers sharpened

66 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

and the speed of the torrents hastened. The canyon
deepened during this time from seven hundred to a
thousand feet. The Yosemite was then a mountain
valley whose sloping sides were crossed by cascades.

Then, about the beginning of the Quaternary
Period, came the biggest convulsion of all. The crest
of the Sierra was hoisted, according to Matthes's cal
culations, as much as eight thousand feet higher in
this one series of movements, and the whole Sierra
block was again tilted, this time, of course, enormously.

For thousands of centuries following, the torrents
from Lyell's and McClure's melting snows must have
descended at a speed which tore boulders from their
anchorages, ground rocks into sand, and savagely
scraped and scooped the river beds. Armed with sharp
hard-cutting tools ripped from the granite cirques of
Sierra's crest, these mad rivers must have scratched
and hewn deep and fast. And because certain val
leys, including the Yosemite, were never filled with
lava like the rest, these grew ever deeper with the
centuries.

The great crust movement of the Quaternary
Period was not the last, by any means, though it was
the last of great size. There were many small ones
later. Several even have occurred within historic
times. On March 26, 1872, a sudden earth movement
left an escarpment twenty-five feet high at the foot of
the range in Owens Valley. The village of Lone Pine
was levelled by the accompanying earthquake. John
Muir, who was in the Yosemite Valley at the time, de-

YOSEMITE, THE INCOMPARABLE 67

scribes in eloquent phrase the accompanying earth
quake which was felt there. A small movement,
doubtless of similar origin, started the San Francisco
fire in 1906.

Conditions created by the great Quaternary tilt
ing deepened the valley from eighteen hundred feet
at its lower end to twenty-four hundred feet at its
upper end. It established what must have been an
unusually interesting and impressive landscape, which
suggested the modern aspect, but required completion
by the glaciers.

Geologically speaking, the glaciers were recent.
There were several ice invasions, produced probably
by the same changes in climate which occasioned the
advances of the continental ice sheet east of the
Rockies. Matthes describes them as similar to the
northern glaciers of the Canadian Rockies of to-day.
For unknown thousands of years the Valley was filled
by a glacier three or four thousand feet thick, and the
surrounding country was covered with tributary ice
fields. Only Cloud's Rest, Half Dome, Sentinel Dome,
and the crown of El Capitan emerged above this ice.
The glacier greatly widened and considerably deepened
the valley, turned its slopes into perpendiculars, and
changed its side cascades into waterfalls. When it
receded it left Yosemite Valley almost completed.

There followed a long period of conditions not
unlike those of to-day. Frosts chipped and scaled the
granite surfaces, and rains carried away the fragments.
The valley bloomed with forests and wild flowers.

68 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Then came other glaciers and other intervening periods.
The last glacier advanced only to the head of Bridal
Veil Meadow. When it melted it left a lake which
filled the Valley from wall to wall, three hundred feet
deep. Finally the lake filled up with soil, brought
down by the streams, and made the floor of the present
valley.

The centuries since have been a period of decora
tion and enrichment. Frost and rain have done their
perfect work. The incomparable valley is complete.

Ill

THE PROPOSED ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK

INCLUDING THE PRESENT SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, WEST
CENTRAL CALIFORNIA. AREA, 1,600 SQUARE MILES

WHERE the lava billows of the Cascade Moun
tains end in northern California the granite
knobs of the Sierra begin. Sharply differentiated in
appearance and nature a few miles further in either
direction, here their terminals overlap, and so nearly
merge that the southern end of the one and the northern
beginning of the other are not easily distinguished by
the untrained eye.

But southward the Sierra Nevada, the snowy
saw-toothed range of the Spaniards, the Sierra of
modern American phrase, rapidly acquires tlie bulk
and towering height, the craggy cirqued summits and
the snowy shoulders which have made it celebrated.
Gathering grandeur as it sweeps southward close to
the western boundary of California, its western slopes
slashed deep with canyons, its granite peaks and domes
pushing ever higher above the scattering forests of its
middle zones, its eastern ramparts dropping in preci
pices to the desert, it valiantly guards its sunny state
against the passage of eastern highways, and forces
hard engineering problems upon the builders of trans-

70 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

continental railroads. Where it becomes the eastern
boundary of the Yosemite National Park it breaks
into climaxes of magnificence.

From this point on the Sierra broadens and bulks.
It throws out spurs, multiplies paralleling ranges, heaps
peaks and ridges between gulf-like canyons which
carry roaring waters through their forested trenches.
Pushing ever higher above timber-line, it breaks into
large lake-bearing cirques, sometimes cirque within
cirque, walled in silvery granite, hung with garlands
of snow and dripping with shining glaciers. Ninety
miles south of Yosemite it culminates in a close group
ing of snow-daubed, glacier-gouged, lightning-splin
tered peaks, one of which, Mount Whitney, highest
summit in the United States, raises his head just a
little above his gigantic neighbors.

South of Whitney, the Sierra subsides rapidly and
merges into the high plateaus and minor ranges of
southern California.

Seventy-five miles of the crest of this titanic
range at the climax of its magnificence, sixty-five miles
of it north of Whitney and ten miles of it south, con
stitute the western boundary of an area of sixteen
hundred square miles which Congress is considering
setting apart under the title of the Roosevelt National
Park; a region so particularly characterized by rug-
gedness, power, and unified purpose that it is eminently
fitted to serve as the nation's memorial to Theodore
Roosevelt. Besides its stupendous mountains, it in
cludes the wildest and most exuberant forested can-

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 71

yons, and the most luxuriant groves in the United
States, for its boundaries will enclose also the present
Sequoia National Park, in which a million trunks of
the famous Sequoia Washingtoniana cluster around the
General Sherman Tree, believed to be the biggest and
oldest living thing in all the world.

Wide though its range from bleak crest to warm
forest, every part of this region is a necessary part of
its whole. Nature's subtle finger has so knitted each
succeeding zone into the fabric of its neighbors that it
would be a vandal's hand which should arbitrarily cut
the picture short of 'the full completion of its perfect
composition. It is one of Nature's masterpieces,
through whose extremest contrasts runs the common
note of supremacy.

Whether or not, then, Congress insures its per
petuity and unified development, we can consider it
scenically only as a whole.

Similar in kind to the Yosemite National Park,
Roosevelt is far ruggeder and more masterful. It will
be the national park of superlatives. Yet each of these
similar areas is a completed unit of striking individ
uality. Yosemite, taking its note from its incompara
ble Valley, never will be equalled for sheer beauty;
Roosevelt knows no peer for exuberance and grandeur.
Yosemite will remain Mecca for the tourist; Roose
velt will draw into its forest of giant trees, and upon
its shoulders of chiselled granite, thousands of campers-
out and lovers of the high trail.

Joined near the crest of the Sierra by the John

72 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Muir Trail, California's memorial to her own prophet
of the out-of-doors, these two national parks, so alike
and yet so different, each striking surely its own note
of sublimity, are, in a very real sense, parts of one still
greater whole; the marriage of beauty and strength.

The region is roughly pear-shaped. A straight
line drawn from Pine Creek Pass at its northern end
to Sheep Mountain on the southern base line meas
ures sixty-eight miles; the park is thirty-six miles
wide at its widest, just north of Mount Whitney. Its
eastern boundary, the crest of the Sierra, divides many
notable peaks. From north to south we pass, as we
travel the John Muir Trail, Mount Humphreys, 13,972
feet; Mount Darwin, 13,841 feet; Mount Winchell,
13,749 feet; Split Mountain, 14,051 feet; Striped
Mountain, 13,160 feet; Mount Baxter, 13,118 feet;
Junction Peak, 13,903 feet; Mount Tyndall, 14,025
feet; and Mount Whitney, 14,501 feet; supporting
Whitney on the south is Mount Langley, 14,042 feet;
all these connected by splintered peaks, granite ledges,
and mountain masses scarcely less in altitude.

Between the bristling crest of this snow-daubed
eastern boundary and the park's western boundary,
thousands of feet lower where the forests begin, the
region roughly divides into parallel zones. That which
immediately adjoins the crest upon its west side, a
strip ten miles or more in width, is known to its

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 73

devotees as the High Sierra. It is a country of tre
mendous jagged peaks, of intermediate pinnacled walls,
of enormous cirques holding remnants of once mighty
glaciers, of great fields of sun-cupped snow, of tur
quoise lakes resting in chains upon enormous granite
steps; the whole gleaming like chased silver in the
noon sun; a magical land of a thousand Matterhorns,
whose trails lead from temple to temple, so mighty of
size and noble of design that no mind less than the
Creator's could ever have conceived them.

The High Sierra has been celebrated for many
years in the fast-growing brotherhood of American
mountain climbers, east as well as west, many of whom
proclaim its marked superiority to all parts of the
Swiss Alps except the amazing neighborhood of Mont
Blanc. With the multiplication of trails and the build
ing of shelters for the comfort of the inexperienced,
the veriest amateur of city business life will find in
these mountains of perpetual sunshine a satisfaction
which is only for the seasoned mountaineer abroad.

The zone adjoining the High Sierra upon its west
is one of far wider range of pleasure. Subsiding rapidly
in elevation, it becomes a knobbed and bouldered land
which includes timber-line and the thin forests of wind-
twisted pines which contend with the granite for foot
hold. It is crossed westward by many lesser ranges
buttressing the High Sierra; from these cross ranges
many loftier peaks arise, and between them roar the
rivers whose thousands of contributing streams drain
the snow-fields and the glaciers of the white heights.

74 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Finally, paralleling the western boundary, is the
narrow zone in which this region meets and merges
with the greater forests and the meadows beyond the
boundary. Here, in the southwestern corner, is the
marvellous warm forest in which trees of many kinds
attain their maximum of size and proportion, and which
encloses a million sequoia trees, including the greatest
and oldest embodiments of the principle of life. This
extraordinary forest was reserved in 1890 under the
title of the Sequoia National Park. At the same time
was created the General Grant National Park, a reser
vation of four square miles of similar forest, virtually
a part of it, but separated because of an intervening
area of privately owned lands.

Thus does this region run the gamut of supremacy
from the High Sierra upon its east, to the Giant Forest
upon its west.

Of no less distinction are its waters. Innumera
ble lakelets of the High Sierra, born of the snows, over
flow in tiny streams which combine into roaring,
frothing creeks. These in turn, augmented by the
drainage of the lofty tumbled divides, combine into
powerful little rivers. Four river systems originate
in this region.

Far in the north a lake, more than eleven thou
sand feet high, lying at the western foot of Mount
Goddard, begins the South Fork of the San Joaquin
River, which drains the park's northern area. Inci
dentally, it has cut a canyon of romantic beauty, up
which the John Muir Trail finds its way into the park.

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 75

The northern middle area of the park is drained
by the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River,
which find their origins in perhaps forty miles of Sierra's
crest. The drainage basins of these splendid streams
cover nearly half of the park's total area, and include
some of the biggest, as well as some of the wildest
and most beautiful mountain scenery in the world.
Bounded upon their west by an arc of snowy moun
tains, separated by the gigantic Monarch Divide,
flanked by twisted ranges and towering peaks, they
cascade westward through meadows of rank grasses
and vividly colored wild-flowers, alternating with
steep-sided gorges and canyons of sublimity. Drop
ping thousands of feet within a few miles, they abound
in cascades and majestic falls, between which swift
rapids alternate with reaches of stiller, but never still,
waters which are the homes of cut-throat trout. Each
of these rivers has its canyon of distinguished magnifi
cence. The Tehipite Valley of the Middle Fork and
the Kings River Canyon of the South Fork are destined
to world celebrity.

The southwestern area of the park is drained by
five forks of the beautiful Kaweah River. These
streams originate on the north in the divide of the
South Fork of the Kings River, and on the east in a
conspicuously fine range known as the Great Western
Divide. They wind through the wooded valleys of
the Sequoia National Park. Upon their banks grow
the monsters of the American forest.

The southern area is drained by the Kern River,

76 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

into which flow the waters of Mount Whitney and his
giant neighbors. The Kern Canyon is one of Roose
velt's noblest expressions. Flowing southward be
tween precipitous walls three thousand feet and more
in height, flanked upon the east by monsters of the
High Sierra, and on the west by the splendid eleva
tions of the Great Western Divide, it is a valley su
premely fitted for the highest realization of the region's
gifts of enjoyment. From camps beside its trout-
haunted waters, it is a matter of no difficulty for those
equipped for the trail to reach the summit of Whitney,
on the one hand, and the Giant Forest on the other.

Near the southern boundary of the park, Golden
Trout Creek enters the Kern. It originates at the
very crest of the Sierra, which it follows closely for
many miles before swinging westward to its outlet.
In this stream is found a trout which appears, when
fresh caught, as though carved from gold. Popularly
it is known as the golden trout; its scientific name is
Salmo Rooseveltii. Originally, no doubt, the color
evolved from the peculiar golden hues of the rocks
through which its waters flow. The golden trout has
been transplanted into other Sierra streams, in some
of which, notably the open upper waters of the Middle
Fork of the Kings, it has thrived and maintained its
vivid hue. In sheltered waters it has apparently dis
appeared, a fact which may merely mean that its
color has changed with environment.

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 77

There are many gateways, two by road, the rest
by trail. For years to come, as in the past, the great
majority of visitors will enter through the Giant For
est of the Sequoia National Park and through the Gen
eral Grant National Park. The traveller by rail will
find motor stages at Visalia for the run into the Giant
Forest, and at Fresno for the General Grant National
Park. The motorist will find good roads into both
from California's elaborate highway system. In both
the traveller will find excellent hotel camps, and, if his
purpose is to live awhile under his private canvas,
public camp grounds convenient to stores and equipped
with water supply and even electric lights. Under the
gigantic pines, firs, and ancient sequoias of these ex
traordinary forests, increasing thousands spend sum
mer weeks and months.

From these centres the lovers of the sublime take
saddle-horses and pack-trains, or, if they are hikers,
burros to carry their equipment, and follow the trails
to Kern Canyon, or the summit of Whitney, or the
Kings River Canyon, or the Tehipite Valley, or the
John Muir Trail upon the Sierra's crest. Many are
the trip combinations, the choice of which depends
upon the time and the strenuousness of the traveller.
Camping-out on trail in Roosevelt is an experience
which demands repetition. Sure of clear weather, the
traveller does not bother with tents, but snuggles at
night in a sleeping-bag under a roof of spreading pine.

78 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

But it is possible to equip for the trail elsewhere.
The principal point upon the north is the Yosemite
National Park, where one may provide himself with
horses and supplies for a journey of any desired dura
tion. Starting in the Yosemite Valley, and leaving
the park near the carved cirques of Mount Lyell, the
traveller will find the intervening miles of the John
Muir Trail a panorama of magnificence. Thousand
Island Lake, reflecting the glorious pyramid of Banner
Peak, the Devil's Postpile, a group of basaltic columns,
far finer than Ireland's celebrated Giant's Causeway,
the Mono Valley, with its ancient volcano split down
through the middle so that all may see its vent and
spreading crater, are merely the more striking features
of a progress of spectacles to the north entrance of
Roosevelt Park; this is at the junction of the South
Fork of the San Joaquin River and Piute Creek. The
principal eastern gateway is Kearsarge Pass, on the
crest of the Sierra a few miles north of Mount Whitney.
The trail ascends from Independence, where one also
may comfortably outfit.

These four are, at this writing, the principal en
trance gates, each opening from points at which parties
may be sure of securing horses, equipment, and guides.
But several other trails enter from the east, south,
southwest, and west sides. All of these in time will
become, with development, well travelled trails into
the heart of the great wilderness.

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 79

Any description of the glories of the John Muir
Trail from its entrance into the park to its climax
upon the summit of Mount Whitney far passes the
limits of a chapter. In time it will inspire a literature.

Approaching from Yosemite through the canyon of
the San Joaquin, the traveller swings around the north
side of Mount Goddard, crosses gorgeous Muir Pass,
and enters the fringe of cirques and lakes which borders
the western edge of Sierra's crest from end to end.
Through this he winds his way southward, skirting
lakes, crossing snowfields, encircling templed cirques,
plunging into canyons, climbing divides, rounding
gigantic peaks, surprising views of sublimity, mount
ing ever higher until he stands upon the shoulders of
Mount Whitney. Dismounting here, he scrambles up
the few hundred feet of stiff climb which places him
on the summit, from which he looks out north, west,
and south over the most diversified high mountain
landscape in America, and eastward over the Sierra
foothills to Death Valley, lowest land in the United
States.

No thrilling Alpine feat is the ascent of our loftiest
summit. But those who want to measure human
strength and skill in terms of perpendicular granite
may find among Whitney's neighbors peaks which
will present harder problems than those offered abroad,
peaks which themselves well may become as celebrated
in future years.

8o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The John Muir Trail is destined to a fame and a
use perhaps many times as great as those men thought
who conceived it as a memorial to a lover of the trail,
and of all that that implies. It will play a distin
guished part in the education of the nation in the love
of mountains. It will win artists to a phase of the
sublime in America which they have overlooked. It
will bring students to the class-rooms where Nature
displays her most tremendous exhibits.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt's lower levels will draw
many times as many devotees as will the High Sierra;
and these visitors will stay longer. It is the valleys
and the canyons which will prove the greatest lure, for
here one may camp leisurely and in entire comfort, and
thence make what trips he chooses into the regions of
the peaks and the cirques.

There are literally thousands of canyons and of
many kinds. Besides the Kern Canyon there are two
which must rank with Yosemite. In the summer of
1916 I travelled the length of the park, as far as the
Giant Forest, with a party led by Director Stephen T.
Mather, of the National Park Service, then Assistant
to the Secretary of the Interior, and was powerfully
impressed with the scenic qualities of the Tehipite
Valley, and the Kings River Canyon, at that time
little known.

Time will not dim my memory of Tehipite Dome,
the august valley and the leaping, singing river which
it overlooks. Well short of the Yosemite Valley in
the kind of beauty that plunges the observer into

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 81

silence, the Tehipite Valley far excels it in bigness,
power, and majesty. Lookout Point on the north rim,
a couple of miles south of the Dome, gave us our first
sensation. Three thousand feet above the river, it
offered by far the grandest valley view I have looked
upon, for the rim view into Yosemite by comparison
is not so grand as it is beautiful.

The canyon revealed itself to the east as far as
Mount Woodworth, its lofty diversified walls lifting
precipitously from the heavy forests of the floor and
sides, and yielding to still greater heights above.
Enormous cliffs abutted, Yosemitelike, at intervals.
South of us, directly across the canyon, rose the strenu
ous heights of the Monarch Divide, Mount Harring
ton, towering a thousand feet higher above the valley
floor than Clouds Rest above the Yosemite. Down
the slopes of the Monarch Divide, seemingly from its
turreted summits, cascaded many frothing streams.
The Eagle Peaks, Blue Canyon Falls, Silver Spur,
the Gorge of Despair, Lost Canyon — these were some
of the romantic and appropriate titles we found on
the Geological Survey map.

And, close at hand, opposite Mount Harrington
and just across Crown Creek Canyon, rose mighty
Tehipite. We stood level with its rounded glistening
dome. The Tehipite Dome is a true Yosemite feature.
It compares in height and prominence with El Capitan.
In fact, it stands higher above the valley floor and
occupies a similar position at the valley's western gate.
It is not so massive as El Capitan, and therefore not

82 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

so impressive; but it is superb. It is better compared
with Half Dome, though again perhaps not so im
pressive. But it has its own august personality, as
notably so as either of these world-famed rocks; and,
if it stood in the Yosemite, would share with them the
incomparable valley's highest honors.

Descending to the floor, the whole aspect of the
valley changed. Looking up, Tehipite Dome, now
outlined against the sky, and the neighboring abrupt
castellated walls, towered more hugely than ever.
We did not need the contour map to know that some
of these heights exceeded Yosemite's. The sky-line
was fantastically carved into spires and domes, a
counterpart in gigantic miniature of the Great Sierra
of which it was the valley climax. The Yosemite
measure of sublimity, perhaps, lacked, but in its place
was a more rugged grandeur, a certain suggestion of
vastness and power that I have not seen elsewhere.

This impression was strengthened by the floor
itself, which contains no suggestion whatever of Yo-
semite's exquisiteness. Instead, it offers rugged spa
ciousness. In place of Yosemite's peaceful woods and
meadows, here were tangled giant-studded thickets
and mountainous masses of enormous broken talus.
Instead of the quiet winding Merced, here was a surging,
smashing, frothing, cascading, roaring torrent, several
times its volume, which filled the valley with its
turbulence.

Once step foot on the valley floor and all thought
of comparison with Yosemite vanishes forever. This

From a photograph by Herbert W. Gleason

TEHIPITE DOME, GUARDIAN ROCK OF THE TEHIPITE VALLEY
It rises abruptly more than three thousand feet; proposed Roosevelt National Park

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 83

is a different thing altogether, but a thing in its own
way no less superlative. The keynote of the Tehipite
Valley is wild exuberance. It thrills where Yosemite
enervates. Yet its temperature is quite as mild.

The Middle Fork contains more trout than any
other stream I have fished. We found them in pools
and riffles everywhere; no water was too white to
get a rise. In the long, greenish-white borders of fast
rapids they floated continually into view. In five
minutes' watching I could count a dozen or more such
appearances within a few feet of water. They ran
from eight to fourteen inches. No doubt larger ones
lay below. So I got great fun by picking my particular
trout and casting specially for him. Stop your fly's
motion and the pursuing fish instantly stops, backs,
swims round the lure in a tour of examination, and
disappears. Start it moving and he instantly reappears
from the white depth, where, no doubt, he has been
cautiously watching. A pause and a swift start often
tempted to a strike.

These rainbows of the torrents are hard fighters.
And many of them, if ungently handled, availed of
swift currents to thresh themselves free.

You must fish a river to appreciate it. Standing
on its edges, leaping from rock to rock, slipping waist
deep at times, wading recklessly to reach some pool
or eddy of special promise, searching the rapids, peer
ing under the alders, testing the pools; that's the way
to make friends with a river. You study its moods
and its ways as those of a mettlesome horse.

84 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

And after a while its spirit seeps through and finds
yours. Its personality unveils. A sweet friendliness
unites you, a sense of mutual understanding. There
follows the completest detachment that I know.
Years and the worries disappear. You and the river
dream away the unnoted hours.

Passing on from the Tehipite Valley to the Kings
River Canyon, the approach to Granite Pass was
nothing short of magnificent. We crossed a superb
cirque studded with lakelets; we could see the pass
ahead of us on a fine snow-crowned bench. We
ascended the bench and found ourselves, not in the
pass, but in the entrance to still another cirque, also
lake-studded, a loftier, nobler cirque encircling the
one below. Ahead of us upon another lofty bench
surely was the pass. Those inspiring snow-daubed
heights whose serrated edges cut sharply into the sky
certainly marked the supreme summit. Our winding
trail up steep, rocky ascents pointed true; an hour's
toil would carry us over. But the hour passed and
the crossing of the shelf disclosed, not the glowing
valley of the South Fork across the pass, but still a
vaster, nobler cirque above, sublime in Arctic glory !

How the vast glaciers that cut these titanic carv
ings must have swirled among these huge concentric
walls, pouring over this shelf and that, piling together
around these uplifting granite peaks, concentrating
combined effort upon this unyielding mass and that,
and, beaten back, pouring down the tortuous main
channel with rendings and tearings unimaginable !

From a photograph by Herbert W . Gleason

EAST VIDETTE FROM A FOREST OF FOXTAIL PINES
This is one of the great granite peaks of the proposed Roosevelt National Park

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 85

Granite Pass is astonishing! We saw no less
than four of these vast concentric cirques, through
three of which we passed. And the Geological Sur
vey map discloses a tributary basin adjoining which
enclosed a group of large volcanic lakes, and doubtless
other vast cirque-like chambers.

We took photographs, but knew them vain.

A long, dusty descent of Copper Creek brought
us, near day's end, into the exquisite valley of the
South Fork of the Kings River, the Kings River
Canyon.

Still another Yosemite !

It is not so easy to differentiate the two canyons
of the Kings. They are similar and yet very different.
Perhaps the difference lies chiefly in degree. Both lie
east and west, with enormous rocky bluffs rising on
either side of rivers of quite extraordinary beauty.
Both present carved and castellated walls of excep
tional boldness of design. Both are heavily and
magnificently wooded, the forests reaching up sharp
slopes on either side. Both possess to a marked degree
the quality that lifts them above the average of even
the Sierra's glacial valleys.

But the outlines here seem to be softer, the valley
floor broader, the river less turbulent. If the keynote
of the Tehipite Valley is wild exuberance, that of the
Kings River Canyon is wild beauty. The one excites,
the other lulls. The one shares with Yosemite the
distinction of extraordinary outline, the other shares
with Yosemite the distinction of extraordinary charm.

86 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

There are few nobler spots than the junction of
Copper Creek with the Kings. The Grand Sentinel
is seldom surpassed. It fails of the personality of
El Capitan, Half Dome, and Tehipite, but it only
just fails. If they did not exist, it would become the
most celebrated rock in the Sierra, at least. The view
up the canyon from this spot has few equals. The
view down the canyon is not often excelled. When
the day of the Kings River Canyon dawns, it will
dawn brilliantly.

The western slopes of the Pacific ranges, from
the Canadian border southward to the desert, carry
the most luxuriant forest in the United States. The
immense stands of yellow pine and Douglas fir of the
far north merge into the sugar pines and giant sequoias
of the south in practically an unbroken belt which, on
Sierra's slopes, lies on the middle levels between the
low productive plains of the west and the towering
heights of the east. The Sequoia National Park and
its little neighbor, the General Grant National Park,
enclose areas of remarkable fertility in which trees,
shrubs, and wild flowers reach their greatest develop
ment. The million sequoia trees which grow here
are a very small part, numerically, of this amazing
forest.

These slopes are rich with the soil of thousands of
years of accumulations. They are warmed in summer
by mild Pacific winds heated in their passage across

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 87

the lowlands, and blanketed in winter by many feet
of soft snow. They are damp with countless springs
and streams sheltered under heavy canopies of foliage.
In altitude they range from two thousand feet at the
bottom of Kaweah's canyon, as it emerges from the
park, to eight thousand feet in the east, with moun
tains rising three or four thousand feet higher.
It is a tumbled land of ridges and canyons, but its
slopes are easy and its outline gracious. Oases of
luscious meadows dot the forests.

This is the Court of King Sequoia. Here assem
ble in everlasting attendance millions of his nobles, a
statelier gathering than ever bowed the knee before
human potentate. Erect, majestic, clothed in togas
of perpetual green, their heads bared to the heavens,
stand rank upon rank, mile upon mile, the noblest
personalities of the earth.

Chief among the courtiers of the king is the sugar-
pine, towering here his full two hundred feet, straight
as a ruler, his stem at times eight feet in thickness,
scarcely tapering to the heavy limbs of his high crown.
Largest and most magnificent of the Pacific pines,
reaching sometimes six hundred years of age, the
greater trunks clear themselves of branches a hundred
feet from the ground, and the bark develops long dark
plates of armor. So marked is his distinguished per
sonality that, once seen, he never can be mistaken for
another.

Next in rank and scarcely less in majesty is the
massive white fir, rising at times even to two hundred

88 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

feet, his sometimes six-foot trunk conspicuously rough,
dark brown in color, deeply furrowed with ashen gray.
His pale yellow-green crown is mysteriously tinged
with white. His limit of age is three hundred and
fifty years.

Last of the ranking trio is the western yellow pine,
a warrior clad in plates of russet armor. A hundred
and sixty feet in natural height, here he sometimes
towers even with his fellow knights. He guards the
outer precincts of the court, his cap of yellow-green,
his branching arms resting upon his sides.

These are the great nobles, but with them are
millions of lesser courtiers, the incense cedar from whose
buttressed, tapering trunks spring countless branches
tipped with fan-like plumes; many lesser conifers; the
splendid Pacific birches in picturesque pose; the oaks
of many kinds far different from their eastern cousins.
And among the feet of these courtiers of higher degree
crowd millions upon millions of flowering shrubs,
massing often in solid phalanxes, disputing passage
with the deer.

All mingle together, great and small. The con
ifers, in the king's honor, flaunt from stem and greater
branch long fluttering ribbons of pale green moss.
Thousands of squirrels chatter in the branches. Mil
lions of birds make music. It is a gala day.

Enter the King.

The King of Trees is of royal lineage. The pa
tient searchers in the rocks of old have traced his an
cestry unknown millions of years, back to the forests

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 89

of the Cretaceous Period. His was Viking stock from
arctic zones where trees can live no more.

To-day he links all human history. The identical
tree around which gather thousands of human courtiers
every year emerged, a seedling, while Nebuchadnezzar
besieged Jerusalem. No man knows how old his pred
ecessors were when finally they sank into death —
mighty fall ! But John Muir counted four thousand
rings in the trunk of one fallen giant, who must have
lived while Pharaoh still held captive the Children of
Israel.

The General Sherman Tree of the Giant Forest,
the oldest living thing to-day, so far as I have been
able to ascertain, probably has seen thirty-six hundred
years. It is evident to the unlearned observer that,
while mature, he is long short of the turn of life. A
thousand years from now he still may be the earth's
biggest and oldest living thing; how much beyond
that none may venture to predict.

Picture, now, the Giant Forest, largest of the sev
eral sequoia groves in the Sequoia National Park.
You have entered, say, in the dusk of the night be
fore, and after breakfast wander planless among the
trees. On every side rise the huge pines and firs,
their dark columns springing from the tangled brush
to support the cathedral roof above. Here an enor
mous purplish-red column draws and holds your as
tonished eye. It is a gigantic thing in comparison
with its monster neighbors; it glows among their dull
columns; it is clean and spotless amid their moss-

9o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

hung trunks; branchless, it disappears among their
upper foliage, hinting at steeple heights above. Yet
your guide tells you that this tree is small; that its
diameter is less than twenty feet; that in age it is a
youngster of only two thousand years! Wait, he
tells you, till you see the General Sherman Tree's
thirty- six and a half feet of diameter; wait till you see
the hundreds, yes thousands, which surpass this
infant !

But you heed him not, for you see another back
among those sugar pines ! Yes, and there's another.
And there on the left are two or three in a clump !
Back in the dim cathedral aisles are reddish glows
which must mean still others. Your heart is beating
with a strange emotion. You look up at the enormous
limbs bent at right angles, at the canopy of feathery
foliage hanging in ten thousand huge plumes. You
cry aloud for the sheer joy of this great thing, and
plunge into the forest's heart.

The Giant Forest contains several thousand se
quoia trees of large size, and many young trees. You
see these small ones on every hand, erect, sharply
pointed, giving in every line a vivid impression of
quivering, bounding life. Later on, as they emerge
above the roof of the forest, for some of them are more
than three hundred feet high, they lose their sharp
ambitious tops; they become gracefully rounded.
Springing from seed less than a quarter of an inch in
diameter, they tend, like their cousins the redwoods,
to grow in groups, and these groups tend to grow in

From a photograph by S. H. Willard > ', \ \ >5 /

BULL FROG LAKE, PROPOSED ROOSEVELT ,NAf IONAL PARK
Along the crest of the Sierra extends a region of lofty cirques and iipnunveraWe'slacii

UNDER A GIANT SEQUOIA

From right to left: Benjamin Ide Wheeler, William Loeb, Jr., Nicholas Murray Butler, John Muir,

Surgeon-General Rixey, U. S. N., Theodore Roosevelt, then President,

George C. Pardee, and William H. Moody

THE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK 91

groves. But there are scattering individuals in every
grove, and many small isolated groves in the Sierra.
The Giant Forest is the largest grove of greatest trees.
The General Grant Grove, in a small national park of
its own, near by, is the second grove in size and impor
tance; its central figure is the General Grant Tree,
second in size and age to the General Sherman Tree.

The dimensions of the greatest trees are aston
ishing. Glance at this table:

NAME

HEIGHT
FEET

DIAMETER
FEET

GIANT FOREST GROVE
General Sherman

270 0

36.5

Abrs.li3.iii Lincoln

27O

,71

William McKinley

2OI

MUIR GROVE
Dalton

2Q2

GARFIELD GROVE
California

260

GENERAL GRANT GROVE
General Grant . .

264

it;

George Washington

9Z&

The Theodore Roosevelt Tree, which has not been
measured at this writing, is one of the noblest of all,
perfect in form and color, abounding in the glory of
young maturity.

To help realization at home of the majesty of the
General Sherman Tree, mark its base diameter, thirty-
six and a half feet, plainly against the side of some
building, preferably a church with a steeple and neigh-

92 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

boring trees; then measure two hundred and eighty
feet, its height, upon the ground at right angles to the
church; then stand on that spot and, facing the church,
imagine the trunk rising, tapering slightly, against the
building's side and the sky above it; then slowly lift
your eyes until you are looking up into the sky at an
angle of forty-five degrees, this to fix its height were it
growing in front of the church.

Imagine its lowest branches, each far thicker than
the trunks of eastern elms and oaks, pushing horizon
tally out at a height above ground of a hundred and
fifty feet, which is higher than the tops of most of the
full-grown trees of our eastern forests. Imagine these
limbs bent horizontally at right angles, like huge elbows,
as though holding its green mantle close about its
form. Imagine the upper branches nearly bare,
shattered perhaps by lightning. And imagine its
crown of foliage, dark yellowish-green, hanging in
enormous graceful plumes.

This is the King of Trees.

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES

THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, NORTH CENTRAL
COLORADO. AREA, 398 SQUARE MILES

THE Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and
the Cascade Range of California, Oregon, and
Washington have each three national parks which
fully represent their kind and quality. The great cen
tral system of the United States, the Rocky Moun
tains, which also possess three national parks, are rep
resented in kind by only one, for Yellowstone is an
exceptional volcanic interlude, and Glacier is the
chance upheaval of shales and limestones from a period
antedating the granite Rockies by many millions of
years; neither in any sense exhibits the nature and
scenic quality of the backbone of our continent.

This is one of the reasons for the extraordinary
distinction of the reservation appropriately called the
Rocky Mountain National Park, namely that it is
the only true example of the continental mountain
system in the catalogue of our national parks. It is
well, therefore, to lay the foundations for a sound
comprehension of its differentiating features.

The Rocky Mountains, which began to rise at the
close of the Cretaceous Period at a rate so slow that
geologists think they are making a pace to-day as

94 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

rapid as their maximum, extend from the plateau of
New Mexico northwesterly until they merge into the
mountains of eastern Alaska. In the United States
physiographers consider them in two groups, the
Northern Rockies and the Southern Rockies, the point
of division being the elevated Wyoming Basin. There
are numerous ranges, known, like the Wasatch Moun
tains, by different names, which nevertheless are con
sistent parts of the Rocky Mountain System.

The Rockies attain their most imposing mass and
magnificence in their southern group, culminating in
Colorado. So stupendous is this heaping together of
granitic masses that in Colorado alone are found forty-
two of the fifty-five named peaks in the United States
which attain the altitude of fourteen thousand feet.
Of the others, twelve are in the Sierra of California,
and one, Mount Rainier, in Washington. Mount El-
bert, in Colorado, our second highest peak, rises within
eighty-two feet of the height of California's Mount
Whitney, our first in rank; Colorado's Mount Massive
attains an altitude only four feet less than Washing
ton's Mount Rainier, which ranks third. In point of
mass, one seventh of Colorado rises above ten thou
sand feet of altitude. The state contains three hun
dred and fifty peaks above eleven thousand feet of
altitude, two hundred and twenty peaks above twelve
thousand feet, and a hundred and fifty peaks above
thirteen thousand feet; besides the forty-two named
peaks which exceed fourteen thousand feet, there are
at least three others which are unnamed.

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 95

Geologists call the Rockies young, by which they
mean anything, say, from five to twenty million years.
They are more or less contemporary with the Sierra.
Like the Sierra, the mountains we see to-day are not
the first; several times their ranges have uplifted upon
wrecks of former ranges, which had yielded to the as
saults of frost and rain. Before they first appeared,
parts of the Eastern Appalachians had paralleled our
eastern sea coast for many million years. The Age of
Mammals had well dawned before they became a
feature in a landscape which previously had been a
mid-continental sea.

The Front Range, carrying the continental divide,
is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed
granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim
summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out
before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade
rise three conspicuous mountains, Longs Peak, fifty
miles northwest of Denver, Mount Evans, west of
Denver, and Pikes Peak, seventy miles to the south.
Longs Peak is directly connected with the continental
divide by a series of jagged cliffs. Mount Evans is
farther away. Pikes Peak stands sentinel-like seventy-
five miles east of the range, a gigantic monadnock,
remainder and reminder of a former range long ages
worn away.

Though many massive mountains of greater alti
tude lie farther west, the Front Range for many rea-

96 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

sons is representative of the Rockies' noblest. To
represent them fully, the national park should include
the three sentinel peaks and their neighborhoods, and
it is earnestly hoped that the day will come when
Congress will recognize this need. At this writing
only the section of greatest variety and magnificence,
the nearly four hundred square miles of which Longs
Peak is the climax, has been thus entitled. In fact,
even this was unfortunately curtailed in the making,
the straight southern boundary having been arbitrarily
drawn through the range at a point of sublimity,
throwing out of the park the St. Vrain Glaciers which
form one of the region's wildest and noblest spectacles,
and Arapaho Peak and its glaciers which in several
respects constitute a climax in Rocky Mountain
scenery.

Thus carelessly cropped, despoiled of the complete
ness which Nature meant it to possess, nevertheless the
Rocky Mountain National Park is a reservation of
distinguished charm and beauty. It straddles the
continental divide, which bisects it lengthwise, north
and south. The western slopes rise gently to the di
vide; at the divide, the eastern front drops in a preci
pice several thousand feet deep, out of which frosts,
rains, glaciers and streams have gouged gigantic gulfs
and granite-bound vales and canyons, whose inter
vening cliffs are battlemented walls and monoliths.

As if these features were not enough to differ
entiate this national park from any other, Nature has
provided still another element of popularity and dis-

From a photograph by Wiswall Brothers

ESTES PARK PLATEAU, LOOKING EAST

Showing the village and the foothills, which are remnants of a former great range, now almost
washed away by erosion; Rocky Mountain National Park

From a photograph by Wiswall Brothers

FRONT RANGE OF THE ROCKIES FROM BIERSTADT LAKE
From right to left: Flattop Mountain, Tyndall Glacier, Hallett Peak, Otis Peak, Andrews Glacier

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 97

tinction. East of this splendid rampart spreads a
broad area of rolling plateau, carpeted with wild flowers,
edged and dotted with luxuriant groves of pine, spruce,
fir, and aspen, and diversified with hills and craggy
mountains, carved rock walls, long forest-grown mo
raines and picturesque ravines; a stream-watered,
lake-dotted summer and winter pleasure paradise of
great size, bounded on the north and west by snow-
spattered monsters, and on the east and south by
craggy wooded foothills, only less in size, and no less
in beauty than the leviathans of the main range.
Here is summer living room enough for several hundred
thousand sojourners from whose comfortable camps
and hotels the wild heart of the Rockies may be vis
ited afoot or on horseback between early breakfast
and late supper at home.

This plateau has been known to summer visitors
for many years under the titles of several settlements;
Moraine Park, Horseshoe Park, and Longs Peak, each
had its hotels long before the national park was created;
Estes Park and Allen's Park on the east side, and
Grand Lake on the west side lie just outside the park
boundaries, purposely excluded because of their con
siderable areas of privately owned land. Estes Park,
the* principal village and the distributing centre of all
incoming routes from the east, is the Eastern Gate
way; Grand Lake is the Western Gateway.

And still there is another distinction, one which
will probably always hold for Rocky Mountain its
present great lead in popularity. That is its position

98 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

nearer to the middle of the country than other great
national parks, and its accessibility from large centres
of population. Denver, which claims with some jus
tice the title of Gateway to the National Parks, mean
ing of course the eastern gateway to the western parks,
is within thirty hours by rail from Chicago and St.
Louis, through one or other of which most travellers
from the east find it convenient to reach the west.
It is similarly conveniently located for touring motor
ists, with whom all the national parks are becoming
ever more popular. From Denver several railroads
lead to east-side towns, from which the park is reached
by motor stages through the foothills, and a motor
stage line runs directly from Denver to Estes Park,
paralleling the range. The west side is reached through
Granby.

Ill

Entry to the park by any route is dramatic. If
the visitor comes the all-motor way through Ward he
picks up the range at Arapaho Peak, and follows it
closely for miles. If he comes by any of the rail
routes, his motor stage emerges from the foothills upon
a sudden spectacle of magnificence — the snowy range,
its highest summits crowned with cloud, looming upon
the horizon across the peaceful plateau. By any
route the appearance of the range begins a panorama
of ever-changing beauty and inspiration, whose prog
ress will outlive many a summer's stay.

Having settled himself in one of the hotels or

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 99

camps of the east-side plateau, the visitor faces the
choice between two practical ways of enjoying himself.
He may, as the majority seem to prefer, spend his weeks
in the simple recreations familiar in our eastern hill
and country resorts; he may motor a little, walk a
little, fish a little in the Big Thompson and its tribu
taries, read and botanize a little in the meadows and
groves, golf a little on the excellent courses, climb a
little on the lesser mountains, and dance or play bridge
in hotel parlors at night. Or else he may avail him
self of the extraordinary opportunity which Nature
offers him in the mountains which spring from his
comfortable plateau, the opportunity of entering into
Nature's very workshop and of studying, with her
for his teacher, the inner secrets and the mighty exam
ples of creation.

In all our national parks I have wondered at the
contentment of the multitude with the less when the
greater, and such a greater, was there for the taking.
But I ceased to criticize the so-called popular point of
view when I realized that its principal cause was igno
rance of the wealth within grasp rather than deliberate
choice of the more commonplace; instead, I write
this book, hoping that it may help the cause of the
greater pleasure. Especially is the Rocky Mountain
National Park the land of opportunity because of its
accessibility, and of the ease with which its inmost
sanctuaries may be entered, examined, and appre
ciated. The story is disclosed at every step. In fact
the revelation begins in the foothills on the way in

ioo THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

from the railroad, for the red iron-stained cliffs seen
upon their eastern edges are remainders of former
Rocky Mountains which disappeared by erosion mil
lions of years ago. The foothills themselves are rem
nants of mountains which once were much loftier than
now, and the picturesque canyon of the Big Thomp
son, through which it may have been your good for
tune to enter the park, is the stream-cut outlet of a
lake or group of lakes which once covered much of the
national park plateau.

Summer life on the plateau is as effective as a
tonic. The altitude varies from seven to nine thou
sand feet; Rocky Mountain's valley bottoms are
higher than the summits of many peaks of celebrity
elsewhere. On every hand stretch miles of tumbled
meadows and craggy cliffs. Many are the excellent
roads, upon which cluster, at intervals of miles, groups
of hotels and camps. Here one may choose his own
fashion of living, for these hostelries range from the
most formal and luxurious hotel to the simplest collec
tion of tents or log cabins around a central log dining
structure. Some of these camps are picturesque, the
growth of years from the original log hut. Some are
equipped with modern comforts; others are as primi
tive as their beginnings. All the larger resorts have
stables of riding horses, for riding is the fashion even
with those who do not venture into the mountains.

Or, one may camp out in the good old-fashioned
way, and fry his own morning bacon over his fire of
sticks.

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES

Wherever one lives, however one lives, in this broad
tableland, he is under the spell of the range. The call
of the mountains is ever present. Riding, walking,
motoring, fishing, golfing, sitting under the trees with
a book, continually he lifts his eyes to their calm heights.
Unconsciously he throws them the first morning glance.
Instinctively he gazes long upon their gleaming moon
lit summits before turning in at night. In time they
possess his spirit. They calm him, exalt him, ennoble
him. Unconsciously he comes to know them in all
their myriad moods. Cold and stern before sunrise,
brilliant and vivid in mid-morning, soft and restful
toward evening, gorgeously colored at sunset, angry,
at times terrifying, in storm, their fascination never
weakens, their beauty changes but it does not lessen.

Mountains of the height of these live in constant
communion with the sky. Mummy Mountain in the
north and Longs Peak in the south continually gather
handfuls of fleecy cloud. A dozen times a day a
mist appears in the blue, as if entangled while passing
the towering summit. A few moments later it is a
tiny cloud; then, while you watch, it thickens and
spreads and hides the peak. Ten minutes later, per
haps, it dissipates as rapidly as it gathered, leaving
the granite photographed against the blue. Or it
may broaden and settle till it covers a vast acreage of
sky and drops a brief shower in near-by valleys, while
meadows half a mile away are steeped in sunshine.
Then, in a twinkling, all is clear again. Sometimes,
when the clearing comes, the summit is white with

FOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

snow. And sometimes, standing upon a high peak
in a blaze of sunshine from a cleared sky, one may
look down for a few moments upon the top of one of
these settled clouds, knowing that it is sprinkling the
hidden valley.

The charm of the mountains from below may
satisfy many, but sooner or later temptation is sure to
beset. The desire comes to see close up those mon
sters of mystery. Many, including most women,
ignorant of rewards, refuse to venture because they
fear hardship. "I can never climb mountains in this
rarefied air," pleads one, and in most cases this is true;
it is important that persons unused to the higher alti
tudes be temperate and discreet. But the lungs and
muscles of a well-trained mountain horse are always
obtainable, and the least practice will teach the un
accustomed rider that all he has to do is to sit his
saddle limply and leave everything else to the horse.
It is my proud boast that I can climb any mountain,
no matter how high and difficult, up which my horse
can carry me.

And so, at last and inevitably, we ascend into the
mountains.

The mountains within the park fall naturally in
two groupings. The Front Range cuts the southern
boundary midway and runs north to Longs Peak,
where it swings westerly and carries the continental
divide out of the park at its northwestern corner.

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 103

The Mummy Range occupies the park's entire north
end. The two are joined by a ridge 11,500 feet in
altitude, over which the Fall River Road is building
to connect the east and the west sides of the park.

The lesser of these two, the Mummy Range, is a
mountain group of distinguished beauty. Its climax
is an arc of gray monsters, Ypsilon Mountain, 13,507
feet, Mount Fairchild, 13,502 feet, Hagues Peak,
13,562 feet, and Mount Dunraven, 12,326 feet; these
gather around Mummy Mountain with its 13,413 feet.
A noble company, indeed, herded in close comrade
ship, the centre of many square miles of summits
scarcely less. Ypsilon's big Greek letter, outlined in
perpetual snow, is one of the famous landmarks of the
northern end. Hagues Peak supports Hallett Glacier,
the most interesting in the park. Dunraven, aloof
and of slenderer outline, offers marked contrast to the
enormous sprawling bulk of Mummy, always por
tentous, often capped with clouds. The range is split
by many fine canyons and dotted with glacial lakes,
an undeveloped wilderness designed by kindly nature
for summer exploration.

But it is the Front Range, the snowy pinnacled
rampart, which commands profoundest attention.

From Specimen Mountain in the far northwest,
a spill of lava, now the haunt of mountain sheep, the
continental divide southward piles climax upon climax.
Following it at an elevation well exceeding twelve
thousand feet, the hardy, venturesome climber looks
westward down a slope of bald granite, thickly strewn

io4 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

with boulders; eastward he gazes into a succession of
gigantic gorges dropping upon the east, forest grown,
lake-set canyons deep in mid-foreground, the great
plateau spreading to its foothills far beyond the can
yons, with now and then a sun glint from some irriga
tion pond beyond the foothills on the misty plains of
eastern Colorado. Past the monolith of Terra Tomah
Peak, with its fine glacial gorge of many lakes, past
the Sprague Glacier, largest of the several shrunken
fields of moving ice which still remain, he finds, from
the summit of Flattop Mountain, a broad spectacle of
real sublimity.

But there is a greater viewpoint close at hand.
Crossing the Flattop Trail which here ascends from
the settlements below on its way to the west side,
and skirting the top of the Tyndall Glacier, a scramble
of four hundred feet lands him on the summit of Hal-
lett Peak, 12,725 feet in altitude. Here indeed is
reward. Below him lies the sheer abyss of the Tyndall
Gorge, Dream Lake, a drop of turquoise in its depths;
beyond it a moraine reaches out upon the plateau —
six miles in length, a mile and more in width, nearly a
thousand feet in height, holding Bierstadt Lake upon
its level forested crown, an eloquent reminder of that
ancient time when enormous glaciers ripped the gran
ite from these gorges to heap it in long winding hills
upon the plains below. Turning southerly, the Wild
Gardens further spread before his gaze, a tumble of
granite masses rising from lake-dotted, richly forested
bottoms. The entrance to Loch Vale, gem canyon of

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 105

the Rockies, lies in the valley foreground. Adjoining
it, the entrance to Glacier Gorge, showing one of its
several lakes, rests in peaceful contrast with its im
pressive eastern wall, a long, winding, sharp-edged
buttress pushing southward and upward to support
the northern shoulder of the monster, Longs Peak,
whose squared summit, from here for all the world
like a chef's cap, outlines sharply against the sky.
Hallett Peak welcomes the climber to the Heart of
the Rockies at perhaps their most gorgeous point.

South of Hallett difficult going will disclose new
viewpoints of supreme wildness. Otis Peak, nearly
as high as Hallett, looks down upon the Andrews Gla
cier, and displays the length of Loch Vale, at whose
head towers Taylor Peak, a giant exceeding thirteen
thousand feet.

I have not sketched this tour of the continental
divide as a suggestion for travel, for there are no trails,
and none but the mountaineer, experienced in pioneer
ing, could accomplish it with pleasure and success, but
as a convenient mode of picturing the glories of the
continental divide. Some day a trail, even perhaps a
road, for one is practicable, should make it fully acces
sible to the greater public. Meantime Flattop Trail
invites valley dwellers of all degrees, afoot and horse
back, up to a point on the divide from which Hallett's
summit and its stupendous view is no great conquest.

The gorges of the Wild Gardens are most enjoyed
from below. Trails of no difficulty lead from the
settlements to Fern and Odessa Lakes in a canyon un-

io6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

surpassed; to Bear Lake at the outlet of the Tyndall
Gorge; to Loch Vale, whose flower-carpeted terraces
and cirque lakelets, Sky Pond and the Lake of Glass,
are encircled with mighty canyon walls; and to Gla
cier Gorge, which leads to the foot of Longs Peak's
western precipice. These are spots, each a day's
round trip from convenient over-night hotels, which
deserve all the fame that will be theirs when the peo
ple come to know them, for as yet only a few hundreds
a summer of Rocky Mountain's hundred thousand
take the trouble to visit them.

To better understand the charm of these gray
monsters, and the valleys and chasms between their
knees, we must pause a moment to picture what archi
tects call the planting, for trees and shrubs and flowers
play as important a part in the informal architectural
scheme of the Front Range as they do in the formality
of a palace. It will be recalled that the zones of vege
tation from the equator to the frozen ice fields of the
far north find their counterparts in altitude. The
foothills bordering the Rocky Mountain National
Park lie in the austral zone of our middle and eastern
states; its splendid east-side plateau and inter-moun
tain valleys represent the luxuriance of the Canadian
zone; its mountains pass rapidly up in a few thousand
feet through the Hudsonian zone, including timber-
line at about 11,500 feet; and its highest summits
carry only the mosses, lichens, stunted grasses, and
tiny alpine flowerets of the Arctic Zone.

Thus one may walk waist deep through the mar-

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 107

vellous wild flower meadows of Loch Vale, bordered
by luxuriant forests of majestic Engelmann spruce,
pines, firs, junipers, and many deciduous shrubs, and
look upward at the gradations of all vegetation to the
arctic seas.

Especially interesting is the revelation when one
takes it in order, climbing into the range. The Fall
River Road displays it, but not dramatically; the
forest approach is too long, the climb into the Hud-
sonian Zone too short, and not typical. The same is
true of the trail up beautiful Forest Canyon. The
reverse is true of the Ute Trail, which brings one too
quickly to the stupendous arctic summit of Trail
Ridge. The Flattop Trail is in many respects the most
satisfying, particularly if one takes the time to make
the summit of Hallett Peak, and hunts for arctic
flowerets on the way. But one may also accomplish
the purpose in Loch Vale by climbing all the way to
Sky Pond, at the very foot of steep little Taylor Gla
cier, or by ascending Glacier Gorge to its head, or by
climbing the Twin Sisters, or Longs Peak as far as
Boulder Field, or up the St. Vrain valley to the top of
Meadow Mountain, or Mount Copeland.

All of these ascents are made by fair trails, and all
display the fascinating spectacle of timber-line, which
in Rocky Mountain National Park, I believe, attains
its most satisfying popular expression; by which I
mean that here the panorama of the everlasting strug
gle between the ambitious climbing forests and the
winter gales of the summits seems to be condensed

io8 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

and summarized, to borrow a figure from the text
books, as I have not happened to find it elsewhere.
Following up some sheltered forested ravine to its
head, we swing out upon the wind-swept slopes lead
ing straight to the summit. Snow patches increase in
size and number as the conifers thin and shrink.
Presently the trees bend eastward, permanently mis
shaped by the icy winter blasts. Presently they curve
in semi-circles, or rise bravely in the lee of some great
rock, to bend at right angles from its top. Here and
there are full-grown trees growing prostrate, like a
rug, upon the ground.

Close to the summit trees shrink to the size of
shrubs, but some of these have heavy trunks a few
feet high, and doubtless have attained their fulness of
development. Gradually they thin and disappear, giv
ing place to wiry, powerful, deciduous shrubs, and these
in turn to growths still smaller. There are forests
of willows just above Rocky Mountain's timber-line,
two or three inches tall, and many acres in extent.

From the Front Range, well in the south of the
park, a spur of toothed granite peaks springs two
miles eastward to the monarch of the park, Longs
Peak. It is this position in advance of the range, as
much as the advantage of its 14,255 feet of altitude,
which enables this famous mountain to become the
climax of every east-side view.

Longs Peak has a remarkable personality. It is an
architectural creation, a solid granite temple, strongly
buttressed upon four sides. From every point of view

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 109

it is profoundly different, but always consistent and
recognizable. Seen from the east, it is supported on
either side by mountains of majesty. Joined with it
on the north, Mount Lady Washington rises 13,269
feet, the cleft between their summits being the way of
the trail to Longs Peak summit. Merging with it in
mass upon the south, Mount Meeker rises 13,911 feet.
Once the three were one monster mountain. Frosts
and rains carried off the crust strata, bared the granite
core, and chipped it into three summits, while a glacier
of large size gouged out of its middle the abyss which
divides the mountains, and carved the precipice,
which drops twenty-four hundred feet from Longs
Peak summit to Chasm Lake. The Chasm, which is
easily reached by trail from the hotels at the moun
tain's foot, is one of the wildest places in America.
It may be explored in a day.

Mountain climbing is becoming the fashion in
Rocky Mountain National Park among those who
never climbed before, and it will not be many years
before its inmost recesses are penetrated by innumera
ble trampers and campers. The "stunt" of the park
is the ascent of Longs Peak. This is no particular
matter for the experienced, for the trail is well worn,
and the ascent may be made on horseback to the boulder
field, less than two thousand feet from the summit;
but to the inexperienced it appears an undertaking of
first magnitude. From the boulder field the trail car
ries out upon a long sharp slant which drops into the
precipice of Glacier Gorge, and ascends the box-like

no THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

summit cap by a shelf trail which sometimes has ter
rors for the unaccustomed. Several hundred persons
make the ascent each summer without accident, in
cluding many women and a few children. The one
risk is that accidental snow obscure the trail; but
Longs Peak is not often ascended without a guide.

The view from the summit of the entire national
park, of the splendid range south which should be in
the park but is not, of the foothills and pond-spotted
plains in the east, of Denver and her mountain back
ground, and of the Medicine Bow and other ranges
west of the park, is one of the country's great spec
tacles. Longs Peak is sometimes climbed at night for
the sunrise.

The six miles of range between Longs Peak and
the southern boundary of the park show five towering
snow-spotted mountains of noble beauty, Mount Alice,
Tanima Peak, Mahana Peak, Ouzel Peak, and Mount
Copeland. Tributary to the Wild Basin, which corre
sponds, south of Longs Peak, to the Wild Gardens
north of it, are gorges of loveliness the waters of whose
exquisite lakes swell St. Vrain Creek.

The Wild Basin is one of Rocky Mountain's lands
of the future. The entire west side is another, for,
except for the lively settlement at Grand Lake, its
peaks and canyons, meadows, lakes, and valleys are
seldom visited. It is natural that the east side, with
its broader plateaus and showier range, should have
the first development, but no accessible country of the
splendid beauty of the west side can long remain

From a photograph by Wiswall Brothers

SUMMIT OF LONGS PEAK, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK
Twenty-four hundred feet from water to peak, a mighty chasm carved by an ancient glacier

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES in

neglected. Its unique feature is the broad and beau
tiful valley of the North Fork of the Grand River,
here starting for its great adventure in the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado.

The Rockies are a masterpiece of erosion. When
forces below the surface began to push them high in
air, their granite cores were covered thousands of feet
deep with the sediments of the great sea of whose
bottom once they were a part. The higher they rose
the more insistently frosts and rains concentrated upon
their uplifting summits; in time all sedimentary rocks
were washed away, and the granite beneath exposed.

Then the frosts and rains, and later the glaciers,
attacked the granite, and carved it into the jagged
forms of to-day. The glaciers moulded the gorges
which the streams had cut. The glaciers have passed,
but still the work goes on. Slowly the mountains
rise, and slowly, but not so slowly, the frosts chisel
and the rains carry away. If conditions remain as
now, history will again repeat itself, and the gorgeous
peaks of to-day will decline, a million years or more
from now, into the low rounded summits of our eastern
Appalachians, and later into the flat, soil-hidden gran
ites of Canada.

These processes may be seen in practical example.
Ascend the precipitous east side by the Flattop Trail,
for instance, and notice particularly the broad, rolling
level of the continental divide. For many miles it is

ii2 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

nothing but a lofty, bare, undulating plain, inter
spersed with summits, but easy to travel except for its
accumulation of immense loose boulders. This plain
slopes gently toward the west, and presently breaks,
as on the east, into cliffs and canyons. It is a stage
in the reduction by erosion of mountains which, ex
cept for erosion, might have risen many thousands of
feet higher. Geologists call it a peneplain, which
means nearly-a-plain; it is from fragmentary remains
of peneplains that they trace ranges long ages washed
away. History may, in some dim future age, repeat
still another wonder, for upon the flattened wreck of
the Front Range may rise, by some earth movement,
a new and even nobler range.

But what about the precipitous eastern front?

That masterpiece was begun by water, accom
plished by ice, and finished by water. In the begin
ning, streams determined the direction of the valleys
and carved these valleys deep. Then came, in very
recent times, as geologists measure earth's history,
the Great Ice Age. As a result of falling temperature,
the mountains became covered, except their higher
summits and the continental divide, with glaciers.
These came in at least two invasions, and remained
many hundreds of thousands of years. When changing
climate melted them away, the Rocky Mountain Na
tional Park remained not greatly different from what
it is to-day. Frosts and rains have softened and
beautified it since.

These glaciers, first forming in the beds of streams

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 113

by the accumulations of snow which presently turned
to ice and moved slowly down the valleys, began at
once to pluck out blocks of granite from their starting-
points, and settle themselves in cirques. They plucked
downward and backward, undermining their cirque
walls until falling granite left precipices; armed with
imprisoned rocks, they gouged and scraped their beds,
and these processes, constantly repeated for thousands
of centuries, produced the mountain forms, the giant
gorges, the enormous precipices, and the rounded
granite valleys of the stupendous east elevation of the
Front Range.

There is a good illustration in Iceberg Lake, near
the base of Trail Ridge on the Ute Trail. This precip
itous well, which every visitor to Rocky Mountain
should see, originally was an ice-filled hollow in the
high surface of the ridge. When the Fall River Gla
cier moved eastward, the ice in the hollow slipped
down to join it, and by that very motion became it
self a glacier. Downward and backward plucking In
the cirque which it presently made, and the falling of
the undermined walls, produced in, say, a few hundred
thousand years this striking well, upon whose lake's
surface visitors of to-day will find cakes of floating
ice, broken from the sloping snow-field which is the
old glacier's remainder and representative of to-day.

The glaciers which shaped Rocky Mountain's big
canyons had enormous size and thickness. Ice streams
from scores of glacial cirques joined fan-like to form
the Wild Basin Glacier, which swept out through the

ii4 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

narrow valley of St. Vrain. Four glaciers headed at
Longs Peak, one west of Mount Meeker, which gave
into the Wild Basin; one west of Longs Peak, which
joined the combination of glaciers that hollowed Loch
Vale; one upon the north, which moulded Glacier
Gorge; and the small but powerful glacier which hol
lowed the great Chasm on the east front of Longs
Peak. The Loch Vale and Glacier Gorge glaciers
joined with giant ice streams as far north as Tyndall
Gorge to form the Bartholf Glacier; and north of that
the mighty Thompson Glacier drained the divide to
the head of Forest Canyon, while the Fall River Glacier
drained the Mummy Range south of Hagues Peak.

These undoubtedly were the main glacial streams
of those ancient days, the agencies responsible for the
gorgeous spectacle we now enjoy. The greater gla
ciers reached a thickness of two thousand feet; they
have left records scratched high upon the granite walls.

As the glaciers moved down their valleys they
carried, imprisoned in their bodies and heaped upon
their backs and sides, the plunder from their wreckage
of the range. This they heaped as large moraines in
the broad valleys. The moraines of the Rocky Moun
tain National Park are unequalled, in my observation,
for number, size, and story-telling ability. They are
conspicuous features of the great plateau upon the
east, and of the broad valley of the Grand River west
of the park. Even the casual visitor of a day is stirred
to curiosity by the straight, high wall of the great
moraine for which Moraine Park is named, and by

From a photograph by Willis T. Lee

THE ANDREWS GLACIER HANGS FROM THE
A glacier in the Rocky Mo

DIVIDE

ntain National Park , Which ^an, be studied >by ni^itoj-sj \

From a photograph by H. T. Cowling

A ROCKY MOUNTAIN CIRQUE CARVED FROM SOLID GRANITE

Iceberg Lake was cut eighteen hundred feet deep by an ancient glacier

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 115

the high curved hill which springs from the north
eastern shoulder of Longs Peak, and encircles the
eastern foot of Mount Meeker.

These and other moraines are fascinating features
of any visit to Rocky Mountain National Park. The
motor roads disclose them, the trails travel them. In
combination with the gulfs, the shelved canyons and
the scarred and serrated peaks and walls, these mo
raines offer the visitor a thrilling mystery story of the
past, the unravelling of whose threads and the recon
struction of whose plot and climax will add zest and
interest to a summer's outing, and bring him, inci
dentally, in close communion with nature in a thou
sand happy moods.

The limitations of a chapter permit no mention
of the gigantic prehistoric monsters of land, sea, and
air which once haunted the site of this noble park, nor
description of its more intimate beauties, nor detail of
its mountaineering joys; for all of which and much
other invaluable information I refer those interested
to publications of the National Park Service, Depart
ment of the Interior, by Doctor Willis T. Lee and
Major Roger W. Toll. But something must be told
of its early history.

In 1819 the exploring expedition which President
Madison sent west under Colonel S. H. Long, while
camping at the mouth of La Poudre River, was greatly
impressed by the magnificence of a lofty, square-topped

n6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

mountain. They approached it no nearer, but named
it Longs Peak, in honor of their leader. Parkman
records seeing it in 1845.

The pioneers, of course, knew the country. Deer,
elk, and sheep were probably hunted there in the
forties and fifties. Joel Estes, the first settler, built a
cabin in the foothills in 1860, hence the title of Estes
Park. James Nugent, afterward widely celebrated as
"Rocky Mountain Jim," arrived in 1868. Others
followed slowly.

William N. Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain
News, made the first attempt to climb Longs Peak in
1864. He did not succeed then, but four years later,
with a party which included Major J. W. Powell, who
made the first exploration of the Grand Canyon the
following year, he made the summit. In 1871 the
Reverend E. J. Lamb, the first regular guide on Longs
Peak, made the first descent by the east precipice, a
dangerous feat.

The Earl of Dunraven visited Estes Park in 1871,
attracted by the big game hunting, and bought land.
He projected an immense preserve, and induced men to
file claims which he planned to acquire after they had
secured possession; but the claims were disallowed.
Albert Bierstadt visited Dunraven in 1874, and painted
canvases which are famous in American art.

It was Dunraven, also, who built the first hotel.
Tourists began to arrive in 1865. In 1874 the first
stage line was established, coming in from Longmont.
Telephone connection was made in 1906.

THE HEART OF THE ROCKIES 117

Under the name of Estes Park, the region pros
pered. Fifty thousand people were estimated to have
visited it in 1914. It was not, however, till the na
tional park was created, in 1915, that the mountains
assumed considerable importance except as an agree
able and inspiring background to the broad plateau.

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS
MOUNT MCKINLEY NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA. AREA,

ABOUT 2,200 SQUARE MlLES

THE monster mountain of this continent, "the
majestic, snow-crowned American monarch," as
General Greeley called it, was made a national park in
1917. Mount McKinley rises 20,300 feet above tide
water, and 17,000 feet above the eyes of the beholder
standing on the plateau at its base. Scenically, it is
the highest mountain in the world, for those summits
of the Andes and Himalayas which are loftier as meas
ured from sea level, can be viewed closely only from
valleys whose altitudes range from 10,000 to 15,000
feet. Its enormous bulk is shrouded in perpetual
snow two-thirds down from its summit, and the foot
hills and broad plains upon its north and west are
populated with mountain sheep and caribou in un
precedented numbers.

To appreciate Mount McKinley's place among
national parks, one must know what it means in the
anatomy of the continent. The western margin of
North America is bordered by a broad mountainous
belt known as the Pacific System, which extends from
Mexico northwesterly into and through Alaska, to the
very end of the Aleutian Islands, and includes such
celebrated ranges as the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade,

118

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 119

and the St. Elias. In Alaska, at the head of Cook
Inlet, it swings a sharp curve to the southwest and be
comes Alaska's mountain axis. This sharp curve, for
all the world like a monstrous granite hinge connecting
the northwesterly and southwesterly limbs of the
System, is the gigantic Alaska Range, which is higher
and broader than the Sierra Nevada, and of greater
relief and extent than the Alps. Near the centre of
this range, its climax in position, height, bulk, and
majesty, stands Mount McKinley. Its glistening
peak can be seen on clear days in most directions for
two hundred miles.

For many years Mount St. Elias, with its eighteen
thousand feet of altitude, was considered North
America's loftiest summit. That was because it
stands in that part of Alaska which was first devel
oped. The Klondike region, far northward, was well
on the way to development before McKinley became
officially recognized as the mountain climax of the
continent. But that does not mean that it remained
unknown. The natives of the Cook Inlet country on
the east knew it as Doleika, and tell you that it is the
rock which a god threw at his eloping wife. They say
it was once a volcano, which is not the fact. The
Aleutes on the south called it Traleika, the big moun
tain. The natives of the Kuskokwim country on the
west knew it as Denalai, the god, father of the great
range. The Russians who established the first per
manent white settlement in Alaska on Kodiak Island
knew it as Bulshia Gora, the great mountain. Cap-

120 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

tain Cook, who in 1778 explored the inlet which since
has borne his name, does not mention it, but Van
couver in 1794 unquestionably meant it in his refer
ence to "distant stupendous mountains."

After the United States acquired Alaska, in 1867,
there is little mention of it for some years. But Frank
Densmore, an explorer of 1889, entered the Kuskok-
wim region, and took such glowing accounts of its
magnificence back to the Yukon that for years it was
known through the settlements as Densmore's Moun
tain. In 1885 Lieutenant Henry C. Allen, U. S. A.,
made a sketch of the range from his skin boat on the
Tanana River, a hundred and fifty miles away, which is
the earliest known picture of McKinley.

Meantime the neighborhood was invaded by pros
pectors from both sides. The Cook Inlet gold fields
were exploited in 1894. Two years later W. A. Dickey
and his partner, Monks, two young Princeton grad
uates, exploring north from their workings, recognized
the mountain's commanding proportions and named
it Mount McKinley, by which it rapidly became known,
and was entered on the early maps. With crude in
struments improvised on the spot, Dickey estimated
the mountain's height as twenty thousand feet — a real
achievement. When Belmore Browne, who climbed
the great peak in 1912, asked Dickey why he chose the
name, Dickey told him that he was so disgusted with
the free-silver arguments of men travelling with him
that he named the mountain after the most ardent
gold-standard man he knew.

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 121

The War Department sent several parties to the
region during the next few years to explore, and the
United States Geological Survey, beginning in 1898
with the Eldridge-Muldrow party, has had topo
graphical and geological parties in the region almost
continuously since. In 1915 the Government began
the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. Its course lies
from Cook Inlet up the Susitna River to the head
waters of the Nenana River, where it crosses the
range. This will make access to the region easy and
comfortable. It was to safeguard the enormous game
herds from the hordes of hunters which the railroad
was expected to bring rather than to conserve an alpine
region scenically unequalled that Congress set aside
twenty-two hundred square miles under the name of
the Mount McKinley National Park.

From the white sides of McKinley and his giant
neighbors descend glaciers of enormous bulk and great
length. Their waters drain on the east and south,
through the Susitna River and its tributaries, into the
Pacific; and on the north and west, through tributaries
of the Yukon and Kuskokwim, into Bering Sea.

The south side of McKinley is forbidding in the
extreme, but its north and west fronts pass abruptly
into a plateau of gravels, sands, and silts twenty-five
hundred to three thousand feet in altitude, whose gentle
valleys lead the traveller up to the very sides of the
granite monster, and whose mosses and grasses pasture
the caribou.

The national park boundaries enclose immense

122 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

areas of this plateau. The contours of its rounded
rolling elevations mark the courses of innumerable
streams, and occasionally abut upon great sweeping
glaciers. Low as it is, the plateau is generally above
timber-line. The day will come when roads will wind
through its valleys, and hotels and camps will nestle
in its sheltered hollows; while the great herds of cari
bou, more than one of which has been estimated at
fifteen hundred animals, will pasture like sheep within
close range of the camera. For the wild animals of
McKinley National Park, having never been hunted,
were fearless of the explorers, and now will never learn
to fear man. The same is true in lesser measure of
the more timid mountain sheep which frequent the
foot-hills in numbers not known elsewhere. Charles
Sheldon counted more than five hundred in one
ordinary day's foot journey through the valleys.

The magic of summer life on this sunlit plateau,
with its limitless distances, its rushing streams, its
enormous crawling glaciers, its waving grasses, its
sweeping gentle valleys, its myriad friendly animals,
and, back of all and commanding all, its never-for
gotten and ever-controlling presence, the shining Range
and Master Mountain, powerfully grip imagination
and memory. One never can look long away from the
mountain, whose delicate rose tint differentiates it
from other great mountains. Here is ever present an
intimate sense of the infinite, which is reminiscent of
that pang which sometimes one may get by gazing
long into the starry zenith. From many points of

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 123

view McKinley looks its giant size. As the climber
ascends the basal ridges there are places where its
height and bulk appall.

Along the northern edge of the park lies the Kan-
tishna mining district. In 1906 there was a wild stam
pede to this region. Diamond City, Bearpaw City,
Glacier City, McKinley City, Roosevelt, and other
rude mining settlements came into rapid existence.
Results did not adequately reward the thousands who
flocked to the new field, and the "cities" were aban
doned. A hundred or two miners remain, scattered
thinly over a large area, which is forested here and there
with scrubby growths, and, in localities, is remarkably
productive of cultivated fruits and vegetables.

Few know and few will know Mount McKinley.
It is too monstrous for any but the hardiest to dis
cover its ice-protected secrets. The South Peak, which
is the summit, has been climbed twice, once by the
Parker-Browne party in 1912, after two previous un
successful expeditions, and once, the year following,
by the party of Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, who grati
fied an ambition which had arisen out of his many
years of strenuous missionary work among the Alaskan
Indians. From the records of these two parties we
gather nearly all that is known of the mountain. The
North Peak, which is several hundred feet lower, was
climbed by Anderson and Taylor of the Tom Lloyd
party, in 1913.

From each of these peaks an enormous buttressing
ridge sweeps northward until it merges into the foot-

i24 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

hills and the great plain. These ridges are roughly
parallel, and carry between them the Denali Glacier,
to adopt Belmore Browne's suggested name, and its
forks and tributaries. Up this glacier is the difficult
passage to the summit. Tremendous as it is, the great
est perhaps of the north side, the Denali Glacier by
no means compares with the giants which flow from
the southern front.

In 1903 Judge James Wickersham, afterward Del
egate to Congress from Alaska, made the first attempt
to climb McKinley; it failed through his underestima
tion of the extensive equipment necessary. In 1906
Doctor Frederick A. Cook, who meantime also had
made an unsuccessful attempt from the north side,
led an expedition from the south which included Pro
fessor Herschel Parker of Columbia University, and
Mr. Belmore Browne, artist, explorer, and big game
hunter. Ascending the Yentna River, it reached a
point upon the Tokositna Glacier beyond which prog
ress was impossible, and returned to Cook Inlet and
disbanded. Parker returned to New York, and Cook
proposed that Browne should lay in a needed supply
of game while he, with a packer named Barrill, should
make what he described as a rapid reconnaissance
preparatory to a further attempt upon the summit
the following year. Browne wanted to accompany
him, but was overpersuaded. Cook and Barrill then
ascended the Susitna, struck into the country due
south of McKinley, and returned to Tyonik with the
announcement that they had reached the summit.

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 125

Cook exhibited a photograph of Barrill standing upon
a crag, which he said was the summit. A long and
painful controversy followed upon Cook's return east
with this claim.

In all probability the object of the Parker-Browne
expedition of 1910 was as much to follow Cook's
course and check his claim as to reach the summit.
The first object was attained, and Herman L. Tucker,
a national forester, was photographed standing on the
identical crag upon which Cook had photographed
Barrill four years before. This crag was found miles
south of McKinley, with other peaks higher than its
own intervening. From here the party advanced up
a glacier of enormous size to the very foot of the upper
reaches of the mountain's south side, but was stopped
by gigantic snow walls, which defeated every attempt
to cross. "At the slightest touch of the sun," writes
Browne, "the great cliffs literally smoke with ava
lanches."

The Parker-Browne expedition undertaken in 1912
for purposes of exploration, also approached from the
south, but, following the Susitna River farther up,
crossed the Alaska Range with dog trains to the north
side at a hitherto unexplored point. Just before cross
ing the divide it entered what five years later became
the Mount McKinley National Park, and, against an
April blizzard, descended into a land of many gorgeous
glaciers. "We were now," writes Belmore Browne,
"in a wilderness paradise. The mountains had a wild,
picturesque look, due to their bare rock summits, and

126 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

big game was abundant. We were wild with enthu
siasm over the beauty of it all, and every few minutes
as we jogged along some one would gaze fondly at the
surrounding mountains and ejaculate: 'This is sure a
white man's country."

Of these " happy hunting grounds," as Browne
chapters the park country in his book, Stephen R.
Capps of the United States Geological Survey says in
his report:

"Probably no part of America is so well supplied
with wild game, unprotected by reserves, as the area
on the north slope of the Alaska Range, west of the
Nanana River. This region has been so little visited
by white men that the game herds have, until recent
years, been little molested by hunters. The white
mountain sheep are particularly abundant in the main
Alaska Range, and in the more rugged foot-hills.
Caribou are plentiful throughout the entire area, and
were seen in bands numbering many hundred indi
viduals. Moose are numerous in the lowlands, and
range over all the area in which timber occurs. Black
bears may be seen in or near timbered lands, and
grizzly bears range from the rugged mountains to the
lowlands. Rabbits and ptarmigan are at times re
markably numerous."

Parker and Browne camped along the Muldrow
Glacier, now a magnificent central feature of the park.
Then they made for McKinley summit. Striking the
Denali Glacier, they ascended it with a dog train to
an altitude of eleven thousand feet, where they made a

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 127

base camp and went on afoot, packing provisions and
camp outfit on their backs. At one place they ascended
an incoming glacier over ice cascades, four thousand
feet high. From their last camp they cut steps in the
ice for more than three thousand feet of final ascent, and
attained the top on July i in the face of a blizzard.
On the northeastern end of the level summit, and only
five minutes' walk from the little hillock which forms
the supreme summit, the blizzard completely blinded
them. It was impossible to go on, and to wait meant
rapid death by freezing; with extreme difficulty they
returned to their camp. Two days later they made a
second attempt, but were again enveloped in an ice
storm that rendered progress impossible. Exhaus
tion of supplies forbade another try, and saved their
lives, for a few days later a violent earthquake shook
McKinley to its summit. Later on Mr. Browne iden
tified this earthquake as concurrent with the terrific
explosive eruption which blew off the top of Mount
Katmai, on the south coast of Alaska.

The following spring the Stuck-Karstens party
made the summit upon that rarest of occasions with
Mount McKinley, a perfect day. Archdeacon Stuck
describes the " actual summit" as "a little crater-like
snow basin, sixty or sixty-five feet long, and twenty
to twenty-five feet wide, with a hay-cock of snow at
either end — the south one a little higher than the
north." Ignoring official and recognized nomenclature,
and calling McKinley and Foraker by their Kuskokwim
Indian names, he writes of Mount Foraker: "Denali's

128 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Wife does not appear at all save from the actual sum
mit of Denali, for she is completely hidden by his
South Peak, until the moment when his South Peak is
surmounted. And never was nobler sight displayed
to man than that great isolated mountain spread out
completely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and
its glaciers, lofty and mighty, and yet far beneath us."

"Above us," he writes a few pages later, "the sky
took on a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed
upon a midday sky like it before. It was deep, rich,
lustrous, transparent blue, as dark as Prussian blue,
but intensely blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly
impressive, that to one at least it ' seemed like special
news of God/ as a new poet sings. We first noticed
the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand Basin,
and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall observed and
discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems
scarcely to have been mentioned since."

A couple of months before the Parker-Browne
party started for the top, there was an ascent of the
lower North Peak which, for sheer daring and en
durance must rank high in the history of adventure.
Four prospectors and miners from the Kantishna region
organized by Tom Lloyd, took advantage of the hard
ice of May, and an idle dog team, to make for the
summit. Their motive seems to have been little more
than to plant a pole where it could be seen by tele
scope, as they thought, from Fairbanks; that was
why they chose the North Peak. They used no ropes,
alpenstocks, or scientific equipment of any sort, and

krom a photograph by G. B. Gordon

MOUNT McKINLEY, LOOMING ABOVE THE GREAT ALASKAN RANGE

From a photograph by LaVoy

ARCHDEACON STUCK'S PARTY HALF-WAY UP THE MOUNTAIN

THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT McKINLEY

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 129

carried only one camera, the chance possession of
McGonagall.

They made their last camp at an altitude of eleven
thousand feet. Here Lloyd remained, while Ander
son, Taylor, and McGonagall attempted the summit
in one day's supreme effort. Near the top McGona
gall was overcome by mountain sickness. Anderson
and Taylor went on and planted their pole near the
North summit, where the Stuck-Karstens party saw
it a year later in their ascent of the South Peak.

So extraordinary a feat of strength and endur
ance will hardly be accomplished again unless, per
haps, by hardy miners of the arctic wilderness. "The
North Pole's nothing to fellows like us," one of them
said later on; "once strike gold there, and we'll build
a town on it in a month."

The published records of the Parker-Browne and
Stuck-Karstens expeditions emphasize the laborious
nature of the climbing. The very isolation which
gives McKinley its spectacular elevation multiplies the
difficulties of ascent by lowering the snow line thousands
of feet below the snow line of the Himalayas and Andes
with their loftier surrounding valleys. Travel on the
glaciers was trying in the extreme, for much of the
way had to be sounded for hidden crevasses, and,
after the selection of each new camping place, the
extensive outfit must be returned for and sledded or
carried up. Frequent barriers, often of great height,
had to be surmounted by tortuous and exhausting
detours over icy cliffs and soft snow. And always

130 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

special care must be taken against avalanches; the
roar of avalanches for much of the latter journey was
almost continuous.

Toward the end, the thermometer was rarely
above zero, and at night far below; but the heat and
glare of the sun was stifling and blinding during much
of the day; often they perspired profusely under their
crushing burdens, with the thermometer nearly at
zero. Snow fell daily, and often several times a day.

It is probable that no other of the world's moun
tain giants presents climbing conditions so strenuous.
Farming is successfully carried on in the Himalayas
far above McKinley's level of perpetual snow, and
Tucker reports having climbed a twenty-thousand-foot
peak in the Andes with less exertion than it cost the
Parker-Browne party, of which he had been a member,
to mount the first forty-five hundred feet of McKinley.

While McKinley will be climbed again and again
in the future, the feat will scarcely be one of the pop
ular amusements of the national park.

Yet Mount McKinley is the northern landmark
of an immense unexplored mountain region south of
the national park, which very far surpasses the Alps
in every feature that has made the Alps world-famous.
Of this region A. H. Brooks, Chief of the Alaska Divi
sion of the United States Geological Survey, writes:

"Here lies a rugged highland area far greater in
extent than all of Switzerland, a virgin field for
explorers and mountaineers. He who would mas
ter unattained summits, explore unknown rivers, or

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS 131

traverse untrodden glaciers in a region whose scenic
beauties are hardly equalled, has not to seek them in
South America or Central Asia, for generations will
pass before the possibilities of the Alaskan Range are
exhausted. But this is not Switzerland, with its hotels,
railways, trained guides, and well-worn paths. It will
appeal only to him who prefers to strike out for him
self, who can break his own trail through trackless
wilds, can throw the diamond hitch, and will take the
chances of life and limb so dear to the heart of the
true explorer."

The hotels will come in time to the Mount McKin-
ley National Park, and perhaps they will come also
to the Alaskan Alps. Perhaps it is not straining the
credulity of an age like ours to suggest that McKin-
ley's commanding summit may be attained some day
by aeroplane, with many of the joys and none of the
distressing hardships endured by the weary climber.
When this time comes, if it does come, there will be
added merely another extraordinary experience to
the very many unique and pleasurable experiences of
a visit to the Mount McKinley National Park.

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST

LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PARK, MAINE. AREA, 10,000 ACRES

IT has been the policy of Congress to create national
parks only from public lands, the title to which
costs nothing to acquire. It may be many years be
fore the nation awakes to the fact that areas distin
guished for supreme scenery, historical association, or
extraordinary scientific significance are worth con
serving even if conservation involves their purchase.
The answer to the oft-asked question why the na
tional parks are all in the west is that the east passed
into private possession before the national park idea
assumed importance in the national consciousness.

The existence of the two national parks east of the
Rocky Mountains merely emphasizes the fact. The
Hot Springs of Arkansas were set apart in 1832 while
the Ozark Mountains were still a wilderness. The
Lafayette National Park, in Maine, is made up of
many small parcels of privately owned land which a
group of public-spirited citizens, because of the im
possibility of securing national appropriations, pa
tiently acquired during a series of laborious years, and
presented, in 1916, to the people of the United States.
While refusing to purchase land for national

parks, Congress nevertheless is buying large areas of

132

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 133

eastern mountain land for national forest, the purpose
being not only to conserve water sources, which na
tional parks would accomplish quite as thoroughly,
but particularly to control lumbering operations in
accord with principles which will insure the lumber
supply of the future. Here and there in this reserve
are limited areas of distinguished national park qual
ity, but whether they will be set aside as national
parks is a question for the people and the future to
decide. Certainly the mountain topography and the
rich deciduous forests of the eastern United States
should be represented in the national parks system by
several fine examples.

The Lafayette National Park differs from all
other members of the national parks system in several
important respects. It is in the far east; it combines
seashore and mountain; it is clothed with a rich and
varied growth of deciduous trees and eastern conifers;
it is intimately associated with the very early his
tory of America. Besides which, it is a region of noble
beauty, subtle charm and fascinating variety.

The Appalachian Mountain uplift, which, roughly
speaking, embraces all the ranges constituting the
eastern rib of the continent, may be considered to
include also the very ancient peneplains of New
England. These tumbled hills and shallow valleys,
accented here and there by ranges and monadnocks,
by which the geologist means solitary peaks, are all
that the frosts and rains of very many millions of
years and the glaciers of more recent geologic times

134 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

have left of what once must have been a towering
mountain region crested in snow. The wrinkling of
the earth's surface which produced this range occurred
during the Devonian period when fishes were the pre
dominant inhabitants of the earth, many millions of
years before birds or even reptiles appeared. Its rise
was accompanied by volcanic disturbances, whose evi
dences are abundant on islands between the mouth of
the Penobscot and Mount Desert Island, though not
within the park. The mind cannot conceive the lapse
of time which has reduced this range, at an erosional
speed no greater than to-day's, to its present level.
During this process the coast line was also slowly sink
ing, changing valleys into estuaries and land-encircled
bays. The coast of Maine is an eloquent chapter in
the continent's ancient history, and the Lafayette
National Park is one of the most dramatic paragraphs
in the chapter.

Where the Penobscot River reaches the sea, and
for forty miles east, the sinking continental shore has
deeply indented the coast line with a network of
broad, twisting bays, enclosing many islands. The
largest and finest of these is Mount Desert Island, for
many years celebrated for its romantic beauty. Upon
its northeast shore, facing Frenchman's Bay, is the
resort town of Bar Harbor; other resorts dot its shores
on every side. The island has a large summer popula
tion drawn from all parts of the country. Besides its
hotels, there are many fine summer homes.

The feature which especially distinguishes Mount

IN LAFAYETTE NATIONAL PAHK ; , , > > ^ >
Echo Lake in the foreground, Sommes Harbor boyo-nd; A^a&a ' ..'

SEA CAVES IN THE GRANITE

Thus does the ocean everlastingly undermine the foundations of the mountains. Photograph
taken at low tide; Lafayette National Park

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 135

Desert Island from other islands, in fact from the en
tire Atlantic coast, is a group of granitic mountains
which rise abruptly from the sea. They were once
towering monsters, perhaps only one, unquestionably
the loftiest for many miles around. They are the sole
remainders upon the present coast line of a great
former range. They are composed almost wholly of
granite, worn down by the ages, but massive enough
still to resist the agencies which wiped away their
comrades. They rise a thousand feet or more, grim,
rounded, cleft with winding valleys and deep passes,
divided in places by estuaries of the sea, holding in
their hollows many charming lakes.

Their abrupt flanks gnawed by the beating sea,
their valleys grown with splendid forests and bright
ened by wild flowers, their slopes and domes sprinkled
with conifers which struggle for foothold in the cracks
which the elements are widening and deepening in
their granite surface, for years they have been the re
sort of thousands of climbers, students of nature and
seekers of the beautiful; the views of sea, estuary,
island, plain, lake, and mountain from the heights have
no counterpart elsewhere.

All this mountain wilderness, free as it was to the
public, was in private ownership. Some of it was
held by persons who had not seen it for years. Some
of it was locked up in estates. The time came when
owners began to plan fine summer homes high on the
mountain slopes. A few, however, believed that the
region should belong to the whole people, and out of

136 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

this belief grew the movement, led by George B.
Dorr and Charles W. Eliot, to acquire title and pre
sent it to the nation which would not buy it. They
organized a holding association, to which they gave
their own properties; for years afterward Mr. Dorr
devoted most of his time to persuading others to con
tribute their holdings, and to raising subscriptions for
the purchase of plots which were tied up in estates.
In 1916 the association presented five thousand acres
to the Government, and President Wilson created it
by proclamation the Sieur de Monts National Monu
ment. The gift has been greatly increased since.
In 1918 Congress made appropriations for its up
keep and development. In February, 1919, Congress
changed its name and status; it then became the La
fayette National Park.

The impulse to name the new national park after
the French general who came to our aid in time of
need arose, of course, out of the war-time warmth of
feeling for our ally, France. The region had been
identified with early French exploration; the original

monument had been named in commemoration of this

•

historical association. The first European settlement
in America north of the latitude of the Gulf of Mexico
was here. Henry of Navarre had sent two famous
adventurers to the new world, de Monts and Cham-
plain. The first colony established by de Monts was
at the mouth of the St. Croix River, which forms the
eastern boundary of Maine, and the first land within
the present United States which was reached by Cham-

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 137

plain was Mount Desert Island. This was in 1604.
It was Champlain who gave the island its present
name, after the mountains which rise so prominently
from its rock-bound shore. To him, however, the
name had a different significance than it first suggests
to us. L'Isle des Monts Deserts meant to him the
Island of the Lonely Mountains, and lonely indeed
they must have seemed above the flat shore line.
Thus named, the place became a landmark for future
voyagers; among others Winthrop records seeing the
mountains on his way to the Massachusetts colony in
1630. He anchored opposite and fished for two hours,
catching "sixty-seven great cod," one of which was
"a yard around. "

"By a curious train of circumstances," writes
George B. Dorr, "the titles by which these mountains
to the eastward of Somes Sound are held go back to
the early ownership of Mount Desert Island by the
Crown of France. For it was granted by Louis XIV,
grandson of Henry IV, to Antoine de la Mothe
Cadillac, an officer of noble fahiily from southwestern
France, then serving in Acadia, who afterward became
successively the founder of Detroit and Governor of
Louisiana— the Mississippi Valley. Cadillac lost it
later, through English occupation of the region, own
ership passing, first to the Province, then to the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But presently the
Commonwealth gave back to his granddaughter —
Madame de Gregoire — and her husband, French refu
gees, the Island's eastern half, moved thereto by the

138 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

part that France had taken in the recent War of In
dependence and by letters they had brought from
Lafayette. And they came down and lived there."

And so it naturally followed that, under stress of
war enthusiasm, this reservation with its French asso
ciations should commemorate not only the old Province
of Acadia, which the French yielded to England only
after half a century of war, and England later on to
us after another war, but the great war also in which
France, England, and the United States all joined as
allies in the cause of the world's freedom. In accord
with this idea, the highest mountain looking upon the
sea has been named the Flying Squadron, in honor of
the service of the air, born of an American invention,
and carried to perfection by the three allies in common.

The park may be entered from any of the sur
rounding resorts, but the main gateway is Bar Har
bor, which is reached by train, automobile, and steam
boat. No resort may be reached more comfortably,
and hotel accommodations are ample.

The mountains rise within a mile of the town.
They extend westward for twelve miles, lying in two
groups, separated by a fine salt-water fiord known as
Somes Sound. The park's boundary is exceedingly
irregular, with deep indentations of private property.
It is enclosed, along the shore, by an excellent auto
mobile road; roads also cross it on both sides of Somes
Sound.

There are ten mountains in the eastern group;
the three fronting Bar Harbor have been renamed,

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 139

for historic reasons, Cadillac Mountain, the Flying
Squadron, and Champlain Mountain. For the same
reason mountains upon Somes Sound have been re
named Acadia Mountain, St. Sauveur Mountain, and
Norumbega Mountain, the last an Indian name;
similar changes commemorating the early English oc
cupation also have been made in the nomenclature of
the western group. Tablets and memorials are also
projected in emphasis of the historical associations of
the place.

Both mountain groups are dotted with lakes;
those of the western group are the largest of the island.

The pleasures, then, of the Lafayette National
Park cover a wide range of human desire. Sea bathing,
boating, yachting, salt-water and fresh-water fishing,
tramping, exploring the wilderness, hunting the view
spots — these are the summer occupations of many
visitors, the diversions of many others. The more
thoughtful will find its historical associations fascinat
ing, its geological record one of the richest in the con
tinent, its forests well equipped schools for tree study,
their branches a museum of bird life.

To climb these low mountains, wandering by the
hour in their hollows and upon their sea-horizoned
shoulders, is, for one interested in nature, to get very
close indeed to the secrets of her wonderful east. One
may stand upon Cadillac's rounded summit and let im
agination realize for him the day when this was a glac-
iered peak in a mighty range which forged southward
from the far north, shoulder upon shoulder, peak upon

i4o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

peak, pushing ever higher as it approached the sea, and
extending far beyond the present ocean horizon; for
these mountains of Mount Desert are by no means
the terminal of the original mighty range; the slow
subsidence of the coast has wholly submerged several,
perhaps many, that once rose south of them. The
valley which now carries the St. Croix River drained
this once towering range's eastern slopes; the valley
of the Penobscot drained its western slopes.

The rocks beneath his feet disclose not only this
vision of the geologic past; besides that, in their slow
decay, in the chiselling of the trickling waters, in the
cleavage of masses by winter's -ice, in the peeling of the
surface by alternate freezing and melting, in the disso
lution and disintegration everywhere by the chemicals
imprisoned in air and water, all of which he sees be
neath his feet, they disclose to him the processes by
which Nature has wrought this splendid ruin. And
if, captivated by this vision, he studies intimately the
page of history written in these rocks, he will find it
full of fascinating detail.

The region also offers an absorbing introduction
to the study of our eastern flora. The exposed bogs
and headlands support several hundred species of
plants typical of the arctic, sub-arctic, and Hudsonian
zones, together with practically all of the common
plants of the Canadian zone, and many of the southern
coasts. So with the trees. Essentially coastal, it is
the land of conifers, the southern limit of some which
are common in the great regions of the north, yet ex-

FRENCHMAN'S BAY FROM THE EAST CLIFF OF CHAMPLAIN MOUNTAIN
Lafayette National Park

LAFAYETTE AND THE EAST 141

hibiting in nearly full variety the species for many
miles south; yet it is also, in its sheltered valleys, re
markably representative of the deciduous growths of
the entire Appalachian region.

The bird life is full and varied. The food supply
attracts migratory birds, and aquatic birds find here
the conditions which make for increase. Deer are
returning in some numbers from the mainland.

In brief, the Lafayette National Park, small
though it is, is one of the most important members of
the national parks system. For the pleasure seeker
no other provides so wide and varied an opportunity.
To the student, no other offers a more readable or more
distinctive volume; it is the only national museum of
the fascinating geology of the east, and I can think
of no other place in the east where classes can find so
varied and so significant an exhibit. To the artist,
the poet, and the dreamer it presents vistas of ocean,
inlet, fiord, shore, wave-lashed promontory, bog,
meadow, forest, and mountain — an answer to every
mood.

If this nation, as now appears, must long lack na
tional parks representative of the range of its splendid
east, let us be thankful that this one small park is so
complete and so distinguished.

THE VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARKS

ON THE VOLCANO IN SCENERY

THE volcanic national parks are Lassen Volcanic,
Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and
Hawaii. Though several of them exhibit extremely high
mountains, their scenic ensemble differs in almost all
respects from that of the granite parks. The landscape
tends to broad elevated surfaces and rolling hills, from
which rise sharp towering cones or massive mountains
whose irregular bulging knobs were formed by out
breaks of lava upon the sides of original central vents.

The Cascade Mountains in Washington, Oregon,
and northern California are one of the best examples of
such a landscape; from its low swelling summits rise
at intervals the powerful master cones of Shasta,
Rainier, Adams, Hood, Baker, and others. Fuji
yama, the celebrated mountain of Japan, may be
cited as a familiar example of the basic mountain form,
the single-cone volcanic peak. Vesuvius is a familiar
example of simple complication, the double-cone vol
cano, while Mauna Loa in Hawaii, including Kilauea
of the pit of fire, a neighbor volcano which it has almost
engulfed in its swollen bulk, well illustrates the vol
cano built up by outpourings of lava from vents broken
through its sides. Flat and rolling Yellowstone with
its geyser fields, is one of the best possible examples
of a dead and much eroded volcanic region.

The scenic detail of the volcanic landscape is in
teresting and different from any other. Centuries

145

146 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

and the elements create from lava a soil of great fer
tility. No forests and wild flowers excel those growing
on the lavas of the Cascades, and the fertility of the
Hawaiian Islands, which are entirely volcanic, is
world-famous. Streams cut deep and often highly
colored canyons in these broad lava lands, and wind
and rain, while eroding valleys, often leave ornately
modelled edifices of harder rock, and tall thin needles
pointing to the zenith.

In the near neighborhood of the volcanoes, as
well as on their sloping sides, are found lava formations
of many strange and wonderful kinds. Hot springs
and bubbling paint pots abound; and in the Yellow
stone National Park, geysers. Fields of fantastic,
twisted shapes, masses suggesting heaps of tumbled
ropes, upstanding spatter cones, caves arched with
lava roofs, are a very few of the very many phenomena
which the climber of a volcano encounters on his way.
And at the top, broad, bowl-shaped craters, whose
walls are sometimes many hundred feet deep, enclose,
if the crater has long been dormant, sandy floors, from
which, perhaps, small cinder cones arise. If the crater
still is active, the adventurer's experiences are limited
only by his daring.

The entire region, in short, strikingly differs from
any other of scenic kind.

Of the several processes of world-making, all of
which are progressing to-day at normal speed, none is
so thrilling as volcanism, because no other concen
trates action into terms of human grasp. Lassen

THE VOLCANIC NATIONAL PARKS 147

Peak's eruption of a thousand cubic yards of lava in a
few hours thrills us more than the Mississippi's erosion
of an average foot of her vast valley in a hundred thou
sand years; yet the latter is enormously the greater.
The explosion of Mount Katmai, the rise and fall of
Kilauea's boiling lava, the playing of Yellowstone's
monster geysers, the spectacle of Mazama's lake-
filled crater, the steaming of the Cascade's myriad
bubbling springs, all make strong appeal to the imagi
nation. They carry home the realization of mysteri
ous, overwhelming power.

Lava is molten rock of excessively high tempera
ture, which suddenly becomes released from the fear
ful pressures of earth's interior. Hurled from vol
canic vents, or gushing from cracks in the earth's skin,
it spreads rapidly over large neighborhoods, filling
valleys and raising bulky rounded masses.

Often it is soft and frothy, like pumice. Even in
its frequent glass forms, obsidian, for example, it
easily disintegrates. There are as many kinds of
lava as there are kinds of rock from which it is formed.

Volcanic scenery is by no means confined to what
we call the volcanic national parks. Volcanoes were
frequent in many parts of the continent. We meet
their remnants unexpectedly among the granites of the
Rockies and the Sierra, and the sedimentary rocks of
the west and the southwest. Several of our national
parks besides those prevailingly volcanic, and several
of our most distinguished national monuments, ex
hibit interesting volcanic interludes.

VII
LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI

THE ONE A NATIONAL PARK IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA,
THE OTHER A NATIONAL MONUMENT IN ALASKA

BECAUSE most of the conspicuous volcanic erup
tions of our day have occurred in warmer climes
nearer the equator, we usually think of volcanoes as
tropical, or semi-tropical, phenomena. Vesuvius is in
the Mediterranean, Pelee in the Caribbean, Mauna
Loa and Kilauea on the Hawaiian Islands. Of course
there is Lassen Peak in California — the exception, as
we say, which proves the rule.

As a fact, many of the world's greatest volcanoes
are very far indeed from the tropics. Volcanoes result
from the movement of earth masses seeking equilib
rium underneath earth's crust, but near enough to the
surface to enable molten rock under terrific pressure
to work upward from isolated pockets and break
through. Volcanoes occur in all latitudes. Even
Iceland has its great volcano. It is true that the vol
cano map shows them congregating thickly in a broad
band, of which the equator is the centre, but it also
shows them bordering the Pacific Coast from Pata
gonia to Alaska, crossing the ocean through the Aleu
tian Islands, and extending far down the Asian coast.
It also shows many inland volcanoes, isolated and in

series. The distribution is exceedingly wide.

148

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 149

Volcanoes usually occur in belts which may or
may not coincide with lines of weakening in the earth's
crust below. Hence the series of flaming torches of
prehistoric days which, their fires now extinguished
and their sides swathed in ice, have become in our day
the row of spectacular peaks extending from northern
California to Puget Sound. Hence also the long range
of threatening summits which skirts Alaska's southern
shore, to-day the world's most active volcanic belt.
Here it was that Katmai's summit was lost in the
mighty explosion of June, 1912, one of enormous
violence, which followed tremendous eruptions else
where along the same coast, and is expected to be fol
lowed by others, perhaps of even greater immensity
and power.

These two volcanic belts contain each an active
volcano which Congress has made the centre of a
national reservation. Lassen Peak, some wise men
believe, is the last exhibit of activity in the dying
volcanism of the Cascade Mountains. Mount Kat-
mai is the latest and greatest exhibit in a volcanic belt
which is believed to be young and growing.

THE BUILDING OF THE CASCADES

Millions of years ago, in the period which geolo
gists call Tertiary, the pressure under that part of the
crust of the earth which now is Washington, Oregon,
and northern California, became too powerful for solid
rock to withstand. Long lines of hills appeared parallel
to the sea, and gradually rose hundreds, and perhaps

150 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

thousands, of feet. These cracked, and from the long
summit-fissures issued hot lava, which spread over
enormous areas and, cooling, laid the foundations for
the coming Cascade Mountains.

When the gaping fissures eased the pressure from
beneath, they filled with ash and lava except at cer
tain vent holes, around which grew the volcanoes
which, when their usefulness as chimneys passed, be
came those cones of ice and snow which noV are the
glory of our northwest.

There may have been at one time many hundreds
of these volcanoes, big and little. Most of them
doubtless quickly perished under the growing slopes of
their larger neighbors, and, as they became choked
with ash, the lava which had been finding vent through
them sought other doors of escape, and found them in
the larger volcanoes. Thus, by natural selection,
there survived at last that knightly company of mon
sters now uniformed in ice, which includes, from north
to south, such celebrities as Mount Baker, Mount
Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount
Hood, vanished Mount Mazama, • Mount Shasta, and
living Lassen Peak.

Whether or not several of these vast beacons lit
Pacific's nights at one time can never be known with
certainty, but probability makes the claim. Whether
or not in their decline the canoes of prehistoric men
found harbor by guidance of their pillars of fire by
night, and their pillars of smoke by day is less proba
ble but possible. One at least of the giant band,

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 151

Lassen Peak, is semi-active to-day. At least two
others, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker, offer evi
dences of internal heat beneath their mail of ice. And
early settlers in the northwest report Indian traditions
of the awful cataclysm in which Mount Rainier lost
two thousand feet of cone.

LASSEN PEAK NATIONAL PARK

Lassen Peak, the last of the Cascades in active
eruption, rises between the northern end of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains, of which it is locally but wrongly
considered a part, and the Klamath Mountains, a
spur of the Cascades. Actually it is the southern
terminus of the Cascades.

Though quiet for more than two hundred years,
the region long has enjoyed scientific and popular
interest because it possesses hot springs, mud vol
canoes and other minor volcanic phenomena, and par
ticularly because its cones, which are easily climbed
and studied, have remained very nearly perfect. Be
sides Lassen Peak, whose altitude is 10,437 ^eet, there
are others of large size and great interest close by.
Prospect Peak attains the altitude of 9,200 feet;
Harkness Peak 9,000 feet; and Cinder Cone, a speci
men of unusual beauty, 6,907 feet.

Because it seemed desirable to conserve the best
two of these examples of recent volcanism, President
Taft in 1906 created the Lassen Peak and the Cinder
Cone National Monuments. Doubtless there would

152 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

have been no change in the status of these reserva
tions had not Lassen Peak broken its long sleep in the
spring of 1914 with a series of eruptions covering a pe
riod of nineteen months. This centred attention upon
the region, and in August, 1916, Congress created the
Lassen Volcanic National Park, a reservation of a
hundred and twenty-four square miles, which included
both national monuments, other notable cones of the
neighborhood, and practically all the hot springs and
other lesser phenomena. Four months after the cre
ation of the national park Lassen Peak ceased activity
with its two hundred and twelfth eruption. It is not
expected to resume. For some years, however, sci
entists will continue to class it as semi-active.

These eruptions, none of which produced any con
siderable lava flow, are regarded as probably the dying
gasps of the volcanic energy of the Cascades. They
began in May, 1914, with sharp explosions of steam
and smoke from the summit crater. The news aroused
wide-spread interest throughout the United States; it
was the first volcanic eruption within the national
boundaries. During the following summer there were
thirty-eight slight similar eruptions, some of which
scattered ashes in the neighborhood. The spectacle
was one of magnificence because of the heavy columns
of smoke. Eruptions increased in frequency with
winter, fifty-six occurring during the balance of the
year.

About the end of March, 1915, according to Doctor
J. S. Diller of the United States Geological Survey,

m a photograph bv J. S. Diller " ' - '

> ' J > 5 ' 3 '

LASSEN PEAK SEEN FROM TEE SOUTHWEST ! »' > 2»,J 'V ' ''^
1 . - ' »»^ » "> j > ' ' '

On the left is the material last erupted from the slope of the peak'. It is called Chaos

Prom a photograph by J. S. Diller

LASSEN PEAK CLOSE UP
Showing the northeast slope as seen from Chaos

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 153

new lava had filled the crater and overflowed the west
slope a thousand feet. On May 22 following occurred
the greatest eruption of the series. A mushroom-
shaped cloud of smoke burst four miles upward in air.
The spectacle, one of grandeur, was plainly visible
even from the Sacramento Valley. " At night," writes
Doctor Diller, "flashes of light from the mountain
summit, flying rocket-like bodies and cloud-glows over
the crater reflecting the light from incandescent lavas
below, were seen by many observers from various points
of view, and . appear to indicate that much of the
material erupted was sufficiently hot to be luminous."

Another interesting phenomenon was the blast of
superheated gas which swept down Lost Creek and
Hot Creek Valleys. For ten miles it withered and
destroyed every living thing in its path. Large trees
were uprooted. Forests were scorched to a cinder.
Snow-fields were instantly turned to water and flooded
the lower valleys with rushing tides.

Later examination showed that this explosion had
opened a new fissure, and that the old and new craters,
now joined in one, were filled with a lava lid. Follow
ing this, the eruptions steadily declined in violence till
their close the following December.

As a national park, though undeveloped and un
equipped as yet, Lassen has many charms besides its
volcanic phenomena. Its western and southern slopes
are thickly forested and possess fine lakes and streams.
Several thousand persons, largely motorists, have vis
ited it yearly of late. There are hot springs at Drakes-

154 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

bad, just within the southern border, which have local
popularity as baths. The trout-fishing in lake and
stream is excellent, and shooting is encouraged in the
extensive national forest which surrounds the park,
but not in the park itself, which is sanctuary. In spite
of the hunting, deer are still found.

The greatest pleasure, however, will be found in
exploring the volcanoes, from whose summits views
are obtainable of many miles of this tumbled and
splendidly forested part of California and of the dry
plains of the Great Basin on its east.

THE KATMAI NATIONAL MONUMENT

We turn from the dying flutter of California's
last remaining active volcano to the excessive violence
of a volcano in the extremely active Alaskan coast
range. The Mount Katmai National Monument will
have few visitors because it is inaccessible by anything
less than an exploring-party. We know it principally
from the reports of four expeditions by the National
Geographic Society. Informed by these reports, Presi
dent Wilson created it a national monument hi 1918.

A remarkable volcanic belt begins in southern
Alaska at the head of Cook Inlet, and follows the coast
in a broad southwesterly curve fifteen hundred miles
long through the Alaskan Peninsula to the end of the
Aleutian Islands, nearly enclosing Behring Sea. It is
very ancient. Its mainland segment contains a dozen
peaks, which are classed as active or latent, and its
island segment many other volcanoes. St. Augustine's

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 155

eruption in 1883 was one of extreme violence. Kugak
was active in 1889. Veniaminof s eruption in 1892
ranked with St. Augustine's. Redoubt erupted in
1902, and Katmai, with excessive violence, in June,
1912. The entire belt is alive with volcanic excite
ment. Pavlof , at the peninsula's end, has been steam
ing for years, and several others are under expectant
scientific observation. Katmai may be outdone at
any time.

Katmai is a peak of 6,970 feet altitude, on treach
erous Shelikof Strait, opposite Kodiak Island. It rises
from an inhospitable shore far from steamer routes or
other recognized lines of travel. Until it announced
itself with a roar which was heard at Juneau, seven
hundred and fifty miles away, its very existence was
probably unknown except to a few prospectors, fisher
men, geographers, and geologists. Earthquakes fol
lowed the blast, then followed night of smoke and
dust. Darkness lasted sixty hours at Kodiak, a hun
dred miles away. Dust fell as far as Ketchikan, nine
hundred miles away. Fumes were borne on the wind
as • far as Vancouver Island, fifteen hundred miles
away. Weather Bureau reports noted haziness as
far away as Virginia during succeeding weeks, and the
extraordinary haziness hi Europe during the following
summer is noted by Doctor C. S. Abbott, Director of
the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian
Institution, in connection with this eruption.

Nevertheless, Katmai's is by no means the great
est volcanic eruption. Katmai 's output of ash was

156 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

about five cubic miles. Several eruptions have greatly
exceeded that in bulk, notably that of Tomboro, in the
island of Sumbawa, near Java, in 1815, when more than
twenty-eight cubic miles of ash were flung to the winds.
Comparison with many great eruptions whose output
was principally lava is of course impossible.

The scene of this explosion is the national monu
ment of to-day. The hollowed shell of Katmai's
summit is a spectacle of wonderment and grandeur.
Robert F. Griggs, who headed the expeditions which
explored it, states that the area of the crater is 8.4
square miles, measured along the highest point of the
rim. The abyss is 2.6 miles long, 7.6 miles in circum
ference, and 4.2 square miles in area. A lake has
formed within it which is 1.4 miles long and nine-
tenths of a mile wide. Its depth is unknown. The
precipice from the lake to the highest point of the rim
measures thirty-seven hundred feet.

The most interesting exhibit of the Katmai Na
tional Monument, however, is a group of neighboring
valleys just across the western divide, the principal one
of which Mr. Griggs, with picturesque inaccuracy,
named the "Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes"; for,
from its floor and sides and the floors and sides of
smaller tributary valleys, superheated steam issues in
thousands of hissing columns. It is an appalling
spectacle. The temperatures of this steam are ex
tremely high; Griggs reports one instance of 432 de
grees Centigrade, which would equal 948 degrees
Fahrenheit; in some vents he found a higher tempera-

LASSEN PEAK AND MOUNT KATMAI 157

ture at the surface than a few feet down its throat.
The very ground is hot.

This phenomenal valley is not to be fully explained
offhand; as Griggs says, there are many problems to
work out. The steam vents appear to be very recent.
They did not exist when Spurr crossed the valley in
1898, and Martin heard nothing of them when he was
in the near neighborhood in 1903 and 1904. The same
volcanic impulse which found its main relief in the ex
plosive eruption of near-by Katmai in 1912 no doubt
cracked the deep-lying rocks beneath this group of
valleys, exposing super-heated rocks to subterranean
waters which forthwith turned to steam and forced
these vents for escape. Griggs reports that volcanic
gases mingle freely with the steam.

The waters may have one or more of several
sources; perhaps they come from deep springs originat
ing in surface snows and rains; perhaps they seep in
from the sea. Whatever their origin the region espe
cially interests us a£ a probably early stage of phenom
ena whose later stages find conspicuous examples in
several of our national parks. Some day, with the
cooling of the region, this may become the valley of
ten thousand hot springs.

But it is useful and within scientific probability
to carry this conception much further. The com
parison between Katmai's steaming valleys and the
geyser basin of Yellowstone is especially instructive
because Yellowstone's basins doubtless once were
what Katmai 's steaming valleys are now. The "Val-

158 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ley of Ten Thousand Smokes " may well be a coming
geyser-field of enormous size. The explanation is
simple. Bunsen's geyser theory, now generally ac
cepted, presupposes a column of water filling the gey
ser vent above a deep rocky superheated chamber, in
which entering water is being rapidly turned into
steam. When this steam becomes plentiful enough
and sufficiently compressed to overcome the weight of
the water hi the vent, it suddenly expands and hurls
the water out. That is what makes the geyser play.

Now one difference between the Yellowstone gey
ser-fields and Katmai's steaming valleys is just a dif
ference in temperature. The entire depth of earth
under these valleys is heated far above boiling-point,
so that it is not possible for water to remain in the
vents; it turns to steam as fast as it collects and
rushes out at the top in continuous flow. But when
enough thousands of centuries elapse for the rocks
between the surface and the deep internal pockets
to cool, the water will remain in many vents as water
until, at regular intervals, enough steam gathers be
low to hurl it out. Then these valleys will become
basins of geysers and hot springs like Yellowstone's.

VIII
MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS

MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK, WEST CENTRAL
WASHINGTON. AREA, 324 SQUARE MILES

MOUNT RAINIER, the loftiest volcano within
the boundaries of the United States, one of our
greatest mountains, and certainly our most imposing
mountain, rises from western central Washington to
an altitude of 14,408 feet above mean tide in Puget
Sound. It is forty-two miles in direct line from the
centre of Tacoma, and fifty-seven miles from Seattle,
from both of which its glistening peak is often a promi
nent spectacle. With favoring atmospheric condi
tions it can be seen a hundred and fifty miles away.

North and south of Rainier, the Cascade Moun
tains bear other snow-capped volcanic peaks. Baker
rises 10,703 feet; Adams, 12,307 feet; St. Helens,
9,697 feet; Hood, 11,225 ^eet> and Shasta, 14,162
feet. But Rainier surpasses them all in height, bulk,
and majesty. Once it stood 16,000 feet, as is indicated
by the slopes leading up to its broken and flattened
top. The supposition is that nearly two thousand
feet of its apex were carried away in one or more
explosive eruptions long before history, but possibly
not before man; there are Indian traditions of a

159

160 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

cataclysm. There were slight eruptions in 1843,
1858, and 1870, and from the two craters at its sum
mit issue many jets of steam which comfort the chilled
climber.

This immense sleeping cone is blanketed in ice.
Twenty-eight well-defined glaciers flow down its
sides, several of which are nearly six miles long.
Imagining ourselves looking down from an airplane at
a great height, we can think of seeing it as an enor
mous frozen octopus sprawling upon the grass, for its
curving arms of ice, reaching out in all directions,
penetrate one of the finest forests even of our north
west. The contrast between these cold glaciers and
the luxuriantly wild-flowered and forest-edged meadows
which border them as snugly as so many rippling
summer rivers affords one of the most delightful fea
tures of the Mount Rainier National Park. Paradise
Inn, for example, stands in a meadow of wild flowers
between Rainier's icy front on the one side and the
snowy Tatoosh Range on the other, with the Nis-
qually Glacier fifteen minutes' walk away !

The casual tourist who has looked at the Snowy
Range of the Rockies from the distant comfort of
Estes Park, or the High Sierra from the dining-porch
of the Glacier Point Hotel, receives an invigorating
shock of astonishment at beholding Mount Rainier
even at a distance. Its isolation gives it enormous
scenic advantage. Mount Whitney of the Sierra, our
loftiest summit, which overtops it ninety-three feet,
is merely the climax in a tempestuous ocean of snowy

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 161

neighbors which are only less lofty; Rainier towers
nearly eight thousand feet above its surrounding
mountains. It springs so powerfully into the air that
one involuntarily looks for signs of life and action.
But no smoke rises from its broken top. It is still
and helpless, shackled in bonds of ice. Will it remain
bound ? Or will it, with due warning, destroy in a day
the elaborate system of glaciers which countless cen
turies have built, and leave a new and different, and
perhaps, after years of glacial recovery, even a more
gloriously beautiful Mount Rainier than now?

The extraordinary individuality of the American
national parks, their difference, each from every other,
is nowhere more marked than here. Single-peaked
glacial systems of the size of Rainier's, of course, are
found wherever mountains of great size rise in close
masses far above the line of perpetual snow. The
Alaskan Range and the Himalayas may possess many.
But if there is anywhere another mountain of approxi
mate height and magnitude, carrying an approximate
glacier system, which rises eight thousand feet higher
than its neighbors out of a parkland of lakes, forests,
and wild-flower gardens, which Nature seems to have
made especially for pleasuring, and the heart of which
is reached in four hours from a large city situated upon
transatlantic railway-lines, I have not heard of it.

Seen a hundred miles away, or from the streets of
Seattle and Tacoma, or from the motor-road approach
ing the park, or from the park itself, or from any of
the many interglacier valleys, one never gets used to

162 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

the spectacle of Rainier. The shock of surprise, the
instant sense of impossibility, ever repeats itself. The
mountain assumes a thousand aspects which change
with the hours, with the position of the beholder, and
with atmospheric conditions. Sometimes it is fairy-
like, sometimes threatening, always majestic. One is
not surprised at the Indian's fear. Often Rainier
withdraws his presence altogether behind the horizon
mists; even a few miles away no hint betrays his ex
istence. And very often, shrouded in snow-storm or
cloud, he is lost to those at his foot.

Mysterious and compelling is this ghostly moun
tain to us who see it for the first time, unable to look
long away while it remains in view. It is the same,
old Washingtonians tell me, with those who have kept
watching it every day of visibility for many years.
And so it was to Captain George Vancouver when,
first of white men, he looked upon it from the bridge
of the Discovery on May 8, 1792.

"The weather was serene and pleasant," he wrote
under that date, "and the country continued to ex
hibit, between us and the eastern snowy range, the
same luxuriant appearance. At its eastern extremity,
mount Baker bore by compass N. 22 E.; the round
snowy mountain, now forming its southern extremity,
and which, after my friend Rear Admiral Rainier, I
distinguished by the name of MOUNT RAINIER, bore
N. (S.) 42 E."

Thus Mount Rainier was discovered and named
at the same time, presumably on the same day.

From a photograph by A. II. Barnes

SOUTHEAST SLOPE OF MOUNT RAINIER
The winding glacier is the Cowlitz. Gibraltar is the rock on the right near the summit

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 163

Eighteen days later, having followed "the inlet,"
meaning Puget Sound, to his point of nearest approach
to the mountain, Vancouver wrote:

"We found the inlet to terminate here in an ex
tensive circular compact bay whose waters washed the
base of mount Rainier, though its elevated summit
was yet at a very considerable distance from the
shore, with which it was connected by several ridges
of hills rising towards it with gradual ascent and much
regularity. The forest trees and the several shades
of verdure that covered the hills gradually decreased
in point of beauty until they became invisible; when
the perpetual clothing of snow commenced which
seemed to form a horizontal line from north to south
along this range of rugged mountains, from whose
summit mount Rainier rose conspicuously, and seemed
as much elevated above them as they were above the
level of the sea; the whole producing a most grand,
picturesque effect."

Vancouver made no attempt to reach the moun
tain. Dreamer of great dreams though he was, how
like a madhouse nightmare would have seemed to
him a true prophecy of mighty engines whose like no
human mind had then conceived, running upon roads
of steel and asphalt at speeds which no human mind
had then imagined, whirling thousands upon thou
sands of pleasure-seekers from the shores of that very
inlet to the glistening mountain's flowered sides !

Just one century after the discovery, the Geologi
cal Society of America started the movement to make

164 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Mount Rainier a national park. Within a year the
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
the National Geographic Society, the Appalachian
Mountain Club, and the Sierra Club joined in the
memorialization of Congress. Six years later, in 1899,
the park was created.

The principal entrance to the park is up the Nis-
qually River at the south. Here entered the pioneer,
James Longmire, many years ago, and the roads estab
lished by him and his fellows determined the direction
of the first national-park development. Longmire
Springs, for many years the nearest resort to the great
mountain, lies just within the southern boundary.
Beyond it the road follows the Nisqually and Paradise
valleys, under glorious groves of pine, cedar, and hem
lock, along ravines of striking beauty, past waterfalls
and the snout of the Nisqually Glacier, finally to in
imitable Paradise Park, its inn, its hotel camp, and its
public camping-grounds. Other centres of wilderness
life have been since established, and the marvel
lous north side of the park will be opened by the con
struction of a northwesterly highway up the valley of
the Carbon River; already a fine trail entirely around
the mountain connects these various points of devel
opment.

But the southern entrance and Paradise Park will
remain for many years the principal centre of explora
tion and pleasuring. Here begins the popular trail to

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 165

the summit. Here begin the trails to many of the
finest view-points, the best-known falls, the most acces
sible of the many exquisite interglacier gardens. Here
the Nisqually Glacier is reached in a few minutes' walk
at a point particularly adapted for ice-climbing, and
the comfortable viewing of ice-falls, crevasses, caves,
and other glacier phenomena grandly exhibited in
fullest beauty. It is a spot which can have in the
nature of things few equals elsewhere in scenic variety
and grandeur. On one side is the vast glistening
mountain; on the other side the high serrated Tatoosh
Range spattered with perpetual snow; in middle
distance, details of long winding glaciers seamed with
crevasses; in the foreground gorgeous rolling meadows
of wild flowers dotted and bordered with equally
luxuriant and richly varied forest groves; from close-by
elevations, a gorgeous tumbled wilderness of hills,
canyons, rivers, lakes, and falls backgrounded by the
Cascades and accented by distant snowy peaks; the
whole pervaded by the ever-present mountain, always
the same yet grandly different, from different points
of view, in the detail of its glaciered sides.

The variety of pleasuring is similarly very large.
One can ride horseback round the mountain in a
leisurely week, or spend a month or more exploring the
greater wilderness of the park. One can tramp the
trails on long trips, camping by the way, or vary a
vacation with numerous short tramps. Or one can
loaf away the days in dreamy content, with now and
then a walk, and now and then a ride. Or one can

166 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

explore glaciers and climb minor mountains; the
Tatoosh Range alone will furnish the stiffest as well
as the most delightful climbing, with wonderful re
wards upon the jagged summits; while short climbs to
points upon near-by snow-fields will afford coasting
without sleds, an exciting sport, especially appreciated
when one is young. In July, before the valley snows
melt away, there is tobogganing and skiing within a
short walk of the Inn.

The leisurely tour afoot around the mountain,
with pack-train following the trail, is an experience
never to be forgotten. One passes the snouts of a
score of glaciers, each producing its river, and sees the
mountain from every angle, besides having a continu
ous panorama of the surrounding country, including
Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, Mount Baker,
Tacoma, Seattle, Mount Olympus, the Pacific Ocean,
and the Cascades from the Columbia to the interna
tional line. Shorter excursions to other beautiful park-
lands offer a wide variety of pleasure. Indian Henry's
Hunting Ground, Van Trump Park, Summerland, and
others provide charm and beauty as well as fascinating
changes in the aspect of the great mountain.

Of course the ascent of the mountain is the ulti
mate objective of the climber, but few, comparatively,
will attempt it. It is a feat in endurance which not
many are physically fit to undertake, while to the un
fit there are no rewards. There is comparatively little
rock-climbing, but what there is will try wind and mus
cle. Most of the way is tramping up long snow-covered

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 167

and ice-covered slopes, with little rest from the start
at midnight to the return, if all goes well, before the
following sundown. Face and hands are painted to
protect against sunburn, and colored glasses avert
snow-blindness. Success is so largely a matter of
physical condition that many ambitious tourists are
advised to practise awhile on the Tatoosh Range be
fore attempting the trip.

"Do you see Pinnacle Peak up there?" they ask
you. "If you can make that you can make Rainier.
Better try it first."

And many who try Pinnacle Peak do not make it.

As with every very lofty mountain the view from
the summit depends upon the conditions of the mo
ment. Often Rainier's summit is lost in mists and
clouds, and there is no view. Very often on the clear
est day clouds continually gather and dissipate; one
is lucky in the particular time he is on top. Fre
quently there are partial views. Occasionally every
condition favors, and then indeed the reward is great.
S. F. Emmons, who made the second ascent, and after
whom one of Rainier's greatest glaciers was named,
stood on the summit upon one of those fortunate mo
ments. The entire mountain in all its inspiring detail
lay at his feet, a wonder spectacle of first magnitude.

"Looking to the more distant country," he wrote,
"the whole stretch of Puget Sound, seeming like a
pretty little lake embowered in green, could be seen
in the northwest, beyond which the Olympic Moun
tains extend out into the Pacific Ocean. The Cascade

168 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Mountains, lying dwarfed at our feet, could be traced
northward into British Columbia and southward into
Oregon, while above them, at comparatively regular
intervals, rose the ghostlike forms of our companion
volcanoes. To the eastward the eye ranged over
hundreds of miles, over chain on chain of mountain
ridges which gradually disappeared in the dim blue
distance."

Notwithstanding the rigors of the ascent parties
leave Paradise Inn for the summit every suitable day.
Hundreds make the ascent each summer. To the ex
perienced mountain-climber it presents no special diffi
culties. To the inexperienced it is an extraordinary
adventure. Certainly no one knows his Mount Rainier
who has not measured its gigantic proportions in units
of his own endurance.

The first successful ascent was made by General
Hazard Stevens and P. B. Van Trump, both residents
of Washington, on August 17, 1870. Starting from
James Longmire's with Mr. Longmire himself as guide
up the Nisqually Valley, they spent several days in
finding the Indian Sluiskin, who should take them to
the summit. With him, then, assuming Longmire's
place, Stevens and Van Trump started on their great
adventure. It proved more of an adventure than they
anticipated, for not far below the picturesque falls
which they named after Sluiskin, the Indian stopped
and begged them to go no farther. From that
compilation of scholarly worth, by Professor Edmond
S. Meany, President of the Mountaineers, entitled

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 169

" Mount Rainier, a Record of Exploration," I quote
General Stevens's translation of Sluiskin's protest:

"Listen to me, my good friends/7 said Sluiskin,
"I must talk with you.

"Your plan to climb Takhoma is all foolishness.
No one can do it and live. A mighty chief dwells
upon the summit in a lake of fire. He brooks no
intruders.

"Many years ago my grandfather, the greatest
and bravest chief of all the Yakima, climbed nearly to
the summit. There he caught sight of the fiery lake
and the infernal demon coming to destroy him, and
fled down the mountain, glad to escape with his life.
Where he failed, no other Indian ever dared make the
attempt.

"At first the way is easy, the task seems light.
The broad snow-fields over which I have often hunted
the mountain-goat offer an inviting path. But above
them you will have to climb over steep rocks over
hanging deep gorges, where a misstep would hurl you
far down — down to certain death. You must creep
over steep snow-banks and cross deep crevasses where
a mountain-goat would hardly keep his footing. You
must climb along steep cliffs where rocks are continu
ally falling to crush you or knock you off into the bot
tomless depths.

"And if you should escape these perils and reach
the great snowy dome, then a bitterly cold and furious
tempest will sweep you off into space like a withered
leaf. But if by some miracle you should survive all

1 70 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

these perils, the mighty demon of Takhoma will surely
kill you and throw you into the fiery lake.

"Don't you go. You make my heart sick when
you talk of climbing Takhoma. You will perish if
you try to climb Takhoma. You will perish and your
people will blame me.

"Don't go! Don't go! If you go I will wait
here two days and then go to Olympia and tell your
people that you perished on Takhoma. Give me a
paper to them to let them know that I am not to
blame for your death. My talk is ended."

Except for the demon and his lake of fire, Sluiskin's
portent of hardship proved to be a literal, even a mod
est, prophecy. At five o'clock in the evening, after
eleven hours of struggle with precipices and glaciers,
exhausted, chilled, and without food, they faced a
night of zero gales upon the summit. The discovery
of comforting steam-jets in a neighboring crater, the
reality perhaps of Sluiskin's lake of fire, made the night
livable, though one of suffering. It was afternoon of
the following day before they reached camp and found
an astonished Sluiskin, then, in fact, on the point of
leaving to report their unfortunate destruction.

Stevens and Van Trump were doubly pioneers,
for their way up the mountain is, in general direction
at least, the popular way to-day, greatly bettered since,
however, by the short cuts and easier detours which
have followed upon experience.

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 171

III

Our four volcanic national parks exemplify four
states of volcanic history. Lassen Peak is semiactive;
Mount Rainier is dormant; Yellowstone is dead, and
Crater Lake marks the spot through which a volcano
collapsed and disappeared. Rainier Js usefulness as a
volcanic example, however, is lost in its supreme use
fulness as a glacial exhibit. The student of glaciers
who begins here with the glacier in action, and then
studies the effects of glaciers upon igneous rocks among
the cirques of the Sierra, and upon sedimentary rocks
in the Glacier National Park, will study the masters;
which, by the way, is a tip for universities contem
plating summer field-classes.

Upon the truncated top of Mount Rainier, nearly
three miles in diameter, rise two small cinder cones
which form, at the junction of their craters, the moun
tain's rounded snow-covered summit. It is known as
Columbia Crest. As this only rises four hundred feet
above the older containing crater, it is not always
identified from below as the highest point. Two com
manding rocky elevations of the old rim, Point Suc
cess on its southwest side, 14,150 feet, and Liberty
Cap on its northwest side, 14,112 feet, appear to be,
from the mountain's foot, its points of greatest alti
tude.

Rainier's top, though covered with snow and ice,
except in spots bared by internal heat, is not the
source of its glaciers, although its extensive ice-fields

172 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

flow into and feed several of them. The glaciers them
selves, even those continuous with the summit ice,
really originate about four thousand feet below the
top in cirques or pockets which are principally fed with
the tremendous snows of winter, and the wind sweep
ings and avalanches from the summit. The Pacific
winds are charged heavily with moisture which de
scends upon Rainier in snows of great depth. Even
Paradise Park is snowed under from twelve to thirty
feet. There is a photograph of a ranger cabin in
February which shows only a slight snow-mound
with a hole in its top which locates the hidden chim
ney. F. E. Matthes, the geologist, tells of a snow
level of fifty feet depth in Indian Henry's Hunting
Ground, one of Rainier's most beautiful parks, in
which the wind had sunk a crater-like hollow from the
bottom of which emerged a chimney. These snows
replenish the glaciers, which have a combined surface
of forty-five square miles, along their entire length, in
addition to making enormous accumulations in the
cirques.

Beginning then in its cirque, as a river often be
gins in its lake, the glacier flows downward, river-like,
along a course of least resistance. Here it pours over
a precipice in broken falls to flatten out in perfect
texture in the even stretch below. Here it plunges
down rapids, breaking into crevasses as the river in
corresponding phase breaks into ripples. Here it rises
smoothly over rocks upon its bottom. Here it strikes
against a wall of rock and turns sharply. The parallel

SLUISKIN RIDGE AND COLUMBIA CREST

m *
Or

From a photograph copyright by A. II. Barnes

MOUNT RAINIER SEEN FROM TACOMA

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 173

between the glacier and the river is striking and con
sistent, notwithstanding that the geologist for tech
nical reasons will quarrel with you if you picturesquely
call your glacier a river of ice. Any elevated view
point will disclose several or many of these mighty
streams flowing in snake-like curves down the moun
tainside, the greater streams swollen here and there
by tributaries as rivers are swollen by entering creeks.
And all eventually reach a point, determined by tem
perature and therefore not constant, where the river
of ice becomes the river of water.

Beginning white and pure, the glacier gradually
clothes itself in rock and dirt. Gathering as it moves
narrow edges of matter filched from the shores, later
on it heaps these up upon its lower banks. They are
lateral moraines. Two merging glaciers unite the
material carried on their joined edges and form a
medial moraine, a ribbon broadening and thickening
as it descends; a glacier made up of several tributaries
carries as many medial moraines. It also carries
much unorganized matter fallen from the cliffs or
scraped from the bottom. Approaching the snout, all
these accumulations merge into one moraine; and so
soiled has the ice now become that it is difficult to tell
which is ice and which is rock. At its snout is an ice-
cave far inside of which the resultant river origi
nates.

But the glacier has one very important function
which the river does not share. Far up at its begin
nings it freezes to the back wall of its cirque, and,

174 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

moving forward, pulls out, or plucks out, as the ge
ologists have it, masses of rock which it carries away
in its current. The resulting cavities in the back of
the cirque fill with ice, which in its turn freezes fast
and plucks out more rock. And presently the back
wall of the cirque, undermined, falls on the ice and also
is carried away. There is left a precipice, often sheerly
perpendicular; and, as the process repeats itself, this
precipice moves backward. At the beginning of this
process, it must be understood, the glacier lies upon
a tilted surface far more elevated than now when you
see it in its old age, sunk deep in its self -dug trench;
and, while it is plucking backward and breaking off an
ever-increasing precipice above it, it is plucking down
ward, too. If the rock is even in structure, this down
ward cutting may be very nearly perpendicular, but
if the rock lies in strata of varying hardness, shelves
form where the harder strata are encountered because
it takes longer to cut them through; in this way are
formed the long series of steps which we often see in
empty glacial cirques.

By this process of backward and downward pluck
ing, the Carbon Glacier bit its way into the north side
of the great volcano until it invaded the very founda
tions of the summit and created the Willis Wall which
drops avalanches thirty-six hundred feet to the glacier
below. Willis Wall is nearly perpendicular because
the lava rock at this point was homogeneous. But in
the alternating shale and limestone strata of Glacier
National Park, on the other hand, the glaciers of old

From a pJiotograph by Asahel Curtis

MOUNT RAINIER AND PARADISE INN IN SUMMER

From a photograph by Jacobs

WINTER PLEASURES AT PARADISE INN, MOUNT RAINIER

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 175

dug cirques of many shelves. The monster ice-streams
which dug Glacier's mighty valleys have vanished, but
often tiny remainders are still seen upon the cirques'
topmost shelves.

So we see that the glacier acquires its cargo of
rock not only by scraping its sides and plucking it
from the bottom of its cirque and valley, but by
quarrying backward till undermined material drops
upon it; all of this in fulfilment of Nature's purpose
of wearing down the highlands for the upbuilding of
the hollows.

This is not the place for a detailed description of
Mount Rainier's twenty-eight glaciers. A glance at
the map will tell something of the story. Extending
northeasterly from the summit will be seen the greatest
unbroken glacial mass. Here are the Emmons and the
Winthrop Glaciers, much the largest of all. This is
the quarter farthest from the sun, upon which its rays
strike at the flattest angle. The melting then is least
here. But still a more potent reason for their larger
mass is found in their position on the lee quarter of
the peak, the prevailing winds whirling in the snow
from both sides.

The greater diversification of the other sides of
the mountain with extruding cliffs, cleavers, and enor
mous rock masses tends strongly to scenic variety and
grandeur. Some of the rock cleavers which divide
glaciers stand several thousand feet in height, verita
ble fences. Some of the cliffs would be mountains of
no mean size elsewhere, and around their sides pour

1 76 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

mighty glacial currents, cascading to the depths below
where again they may meet and even merge.

The Nisqually Glacier naturally is the most cele
brated, not because of scenic superiority, but because
it is the neighbor and the playground of the visiting
thousands. Its perfect and wonderful beauty are not
in excess of many others; and it is much smaller than
many. The Cowlitz Glacier near by exceeds it in
size, and is one of the stateliest; it springs from a
cirque below Gibraltar, a massive near-summit rock,
whose well-deserved celebrity is due in some part to
its nearness to the travelled summit trail. The point
I am making is not in depreciation of any of the cele
brated sights from the southern side, but in emphasis
of the fact that a hundred other sights would be as
celebrated, or more celebrated, were they as well known.
The Mount Rainier National Park at this writing is
replete with splendors which are yet to be discovered
by the greater travelling public.

The great north side, for instance, with its mighty
walls, its magnificently scenic glaciers, its lakes, can
yons, and enormous areas of flowered and forested
pleasure-grounds, is destined to wide development;
it is a national park in itself. Already roads enter to
camps at the foot of great glaciers. The west side,
also, with its four spectacular glaciers which pass un
der the names of Mowich and Tahoma, attains sublim
ity; it remains also for future occupation.

Many of the minor phenomena, while common
also to other areas of snow and ice, have fascination

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 177

for the visitor. Snow-cups are always objects of in
terest and beauty. Instead of reducing a snow sur
face evenly, the warm sun sometimes melts it in pat
terned cups set close together like the squares of a
checker-board. These deepen gradually till they sug
gest a gigantic honeycomb, whose cells are sometimes
several feet deep. In one of these, one summer day
in the Sierra, I saw a stumbling horse deposit his rider,
a high official of one of our Western railroads; and
there he sat helpless, hands and feet emerging from the
top, until we recovered enough from laughter to help
him out.

Pink snow always arouses lively interest. A mi
croscopic plant, Protococcus nivalis, growing in occa
sional patches beneath the surface of old snow grad
ually emerges with a pink glow which sometimes
covers acres. On the tongue its flavor suggests water
melon. No doubt many other microscopic plants
thrive in the snow-fields and glaciers which remain in
visible for lack of color. Insects also inhabit these
glaciers. There are several Thysanura, which suggest
the sand-fleas of our seashores, but are seldom noticed
because of their small size. More noticeable are the
Mesenchytraeus, a slender brown worm, which attains
the length of an inch. They may be seen in great
numbers on the lower glaciers in the summer, but on
warm days retreat well under the surface.

178 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The extraordinary forest luxuriance at the base
of Mount Rainier is due to moisture and climate. The
same heavy snowfalls which feed the glaciers store up
water-supplies for forest and meadow. The winters
at the base of the mountain are mild.

The lower valleys are covered with a dense growth
of fir, hemlock, and cedar. Pushing skyward in com
petition for the sunlight, trees attain great heights.
Protected from winter's severity by the thickness of
the growth, and from fire by the dampness of the soil,
great age is assured, which means thick and heavy
trunks. The Douglas fir, easily the most important
timber-tree of western America, here reaches its two
hundred feet in massive forests, while occasional indi
viduate grow two hundred and fifty to two hundred and
seventy feet with a diameter of eight feet. The bark
at the base of these monsters is sometimes ten inches
thick. The western hemlock also reaches equal heights
in competition for the light, with diameters of five feet
or more. Red cedar, white pines of several varieties,
several firs, and a variety of hemlocks complete the list
of conifers. Deciduous trees are few and not important.
Broad-leaved maples, cottonwoods, and alders are the
principal species.

Higher up the mountain-slopes the forests thin
and lessen in size, while increasing in picturesqueness.
The Douglas fir and other monsters of the lower levels
disappear, their places taken by other species. At an

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 179

altitude of four thousand feet the Englemarin spruce
and other mountain-trees begin to appear, not in the
massed ranks of the lower levels, but in groves border
ing the flowered opens.

The extreme limit of tree growth on Mount Rai
nier is about seven thousand feet of altitude, above
which one finds only occasional distorted, wind-tor
tured mountain-hemlocks. There is no well-defined
timber-line, as on other lofty mountains. Avalanches
and snow-slides keep the upper levels swept and
bare.

The wild-flower catalogue is too long to enumerate
here. John Muir expresses the belief that no other
subalpine floral gardens excel Rainier's in profusion
and gorgeousness. The region differs little from other
Pacific regions of similar altitude in variety of species;
in luxuriance it is unsurpassed.

According to Theodore Winthrop who visited the
northwest in 1853 and published a book entitled "The
Canoe and the Saddle," which had wide vogue at the
time and is consulted to-day, Mount Rainier had its
Indian Rip Van Winkle. The story was told him in
great detail by Hamitchou, "a frowsy ancient of the
Squallyamish." The hero was a wise and wily fisher
man and hunter. Also, as his passion was gain, he
became an excellent business man. He always had
salmon and berries when food became scarce and prices

i8o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

high. Gradually he amassed large savings in hiaqua,
the little perforated shell which was the most valued
form of wampum, the Indian's money. The richer he
got the stronger his passion grew for hiaqua, and, when
a spirit told him in a dream of vast hoards at the
summit of Rainier, he determined to climb the moun
tain. The spirit was Tamanoiis, which, Winthrop ex
plains, is the vague Indian personification of the super
natural.

So he threaded the forests and climbed the moun
tain's glistening side. At the summit he looked over
the rim into a large basin in the bottom of which was
a black lake surrounded by purple rock. At the lake's
eastern end stood three monuments. The first was as
tall as a man and had a head carved like a salmon;
the second was the image of a camas-bulb; the two
represented the great necessities of Indian life. The
third was a stone elk's head with the antlers in velvet.
At the foot of this monument he dug a hole.

Suddenly a noise behind him caused him to turn.
An otter clambered over the edge of the lake and
struck the snow with its tail. Eleven others followed.
Each was twice as big as any otter he had ever seen;
their chief was four times as big. The eleven sat
themselves in a circle around him; the leader climbed
upon the stone elk-head.

At first the treasure-seeker was abashed, but he
had come to find hiaqua and he went on digging. At
every thirteenth stroke the leader of the otters tapped
the stone elk with his tail, and the eleven followers

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 181

tapped the snow with their tails. Once they all
gathered closer and whacked the digger good and hard
with their tails, but, though astonished and badly
bruised, he went on working. Presently he broke his
elkhorn pick, but the biggest otter seized another in
his teeth and handed it to him.

Finally his pick struck a flat rock with a hollow
sound, and the otters all drew near and gazed into the
hole, breathing excitedly. He lifted the rock and under
it found a cavity filled to the brim with pure-white
hiaqua, every shell large, unbroken and beautiful. All
were hung neatly on strings.

Never was treasure-quest so successful ! The ot
ters, recognizing him as the favorite of Tamanoiis,
retired to a distance and gazed upon him respectfully.

"But the miser," writes the narrator, "never
dreamed of gratitude, never thought to hang a string
from the buried treasure about the salmon and kamas
tamanoiis stones, and two strings around the elk's
head; no, all must be his own, all he could carry now,
and the rest for the future."

Greedily he loaded himself with the booty and
laboriously climbed to the rim of the bowl prepared
for the descent of the mountain. The otters, puffing
in concert, plunged again into the lake, which at once
disappeared under a black cloud.

Straightway a terrible storm arose through which
the voice of Tamanoiis screamed tauntingly. Black
ness closed around him. The din was horrible. Terri
fied, he threw back into the bowl behind him five

182 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

strings of hiaqua to propitiate Tamanoiis, and there
followed a momentary lull, during which he started
homeward. But immediately the storm burst again
with roarings like ten thousand bears.

Nothing could be done but to throw back more
hiaqua. Following each sacrifice came another lull,
followed in turn by more terrible outbreaks. And so,
string by string, he parted with all his gains. Then he
sank to the ground insensible.

When he awoke he lay under an arbutus-tree in a
meadow of camas. He was shockingly stiff and every
movement pained him. But he managed to gather
and smoke some dry arbutus-leaves and eat a few
camas-bulbs. He was astonished to find his hair very
long and matted, and himself bent and feeble. "Ta-
manoiis," he muttered. Nevertheless, he was calm
and happy. Strangely, he did not regret his lost
strings of hiaqua. Fear was gone and his heart was
filled with love.

Slowly and painfully he made his way home.
Everything was strangely altered. Ancient trees grew
where shrubs had grown four days before. Cedars
under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the
ground. Where his lodge had stood now he saw a new
and handsome lodge, and presently out of it came a
very old decrepit squaw who, nevertheless, through her
wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to
him. Her shoulders were hung thick with hiaqua
strings. She bent over a pot of boiling salmon and
crooned :

MOUNT RAINIER, ICY OCTOPUS 183

"My old man has gone, gone, gone.
My old man to Tacoma has gone.
To hunt the elk he went long ago.
When will he come down, down, down
To salmon pot and me?"

"He has come down," quavered the returned
traveller, at last recognizing his wife.

He asked no questions. Charging it all to the
wrath of Tamanoiis, he accepted fate as he found it.
After all, it was a happy fate enough in the end, for
the old man became the Great Medicine-Man of his
tribe, by whom he was greatly revered.

The name of this Rip Van Winkle of Mount Rainier
is not mentioned in Mr, Winthrop's narrative.

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO

CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN OREGON.
AREA, 249 SQUARE MILES

/CRATER LAKE is in southwestern Oregon
V^ among the Cascade Mountains, and is reached
by an automobile ride of several hours from Medford.
The government information circular calls it "the
deepest and bluest lake in the world." Advertising
circulars praise it in choicest professional phrase.
Its beauty is described as exceeding that of any other
lake in all the world. Never was blue so wonderful
as the blue of these waters; never were waters so deep
as its two thousand feet.

Lured by this eloquence the traveller goes to Crater
Lake and finds it all as promised — in fact, far better
than promised, for the best intended adjectives, even
when winged by the energetic pen of the most talented
ad writer, cannot begin to convey the glowing, chang
ing, mysterious loveliness of this lake of unbelievable
beauty. In fact, the tourist, with expectation at fever-
heat by the time he steps from the auto-stage upon
the crater rim, is silenced as much by astonishment
as by admiration.

Before him lies a crater of pale pearly lava several
miles in diameter. A thousand feet below its rim is a

lake whose farthest blues vie in delicacy with the

184

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 185

horizon lavas, and deepen as they approach till at his
feet they turn to almost black. There is nothing with
which to compare the near-by blue looked sharply
down upon from Crater's rim. The deepest indigo
is nearest its intensity, but at certain angles falls far
short.

Nor is it only the color which affects him so
strongly; its kind is something new, startling, and
altogether lovely. Its surface, so magically framed
and tinted, is broken by fleeting silver wind-streaks
here and there; otherwise, it has the vast stillness
which we associate with the Grand Canyon and the sky
at night. The lava walls are pearly, faintly blue afar
off, graying and daubed with many colors nearer by.
Pinks, purples, brick-reds, sulphurs, orange-yellows
and many intermediates streak and splash the fore
ground gray. And often pine-green forests fringe the
rim, and funnel down sharply tilted canyons to the
water's edge; and sometimes shrubs of livelier green
find foothold on the gentler slopes, and, spreading,
paint bright patches. Over all, shutting down and
around it like a giant bowl, is a sky of Californian blue
overhead softening to the pearl of the horizon. A
wonder spectacle indeed !

And then our tourist, recovering from his trance,
walks upon the rim and descends the trail to the
water's edge to join a launch-party around the lake.
Here he finds a new and different experience which is
quite as sensational as that of his original discovery.
Seen close by from the lake's surface these tinted lava

186 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

cliffs are carved as grotesquely as a Japanese ivory.
Precipices rise at times two thousand feet, sheer as a
wall. Elsewhere gentle slopes of powdery lava, moss-
tinted, connect rim and water with a ruler line. And
between these two extremes are found every fashion
and kind and degree of lava wall, many of them pre
cipitous, most of them rugged, all of them contorted
and carved in the most fantastic manner that imagina
tion can picture. Caves open their dark doors at
water's edge. Towered rocks emerge from submerged
reefs. A mimic volcano rises from the water near one
side. Perpetual snow fills sheltered crevices in the
southern rim.

And all this wonder is reflected, upside down, in
the still mirror through which the launch ploughs its
rapid way. But looking backward where the inverted
picture is broken and tossed by the waves from the
launch's prow, he looks upon a kaleidoscope of color
which he will remember all his life; for, to the gorgeous
disarray of the broken image of the cliffs is added the
magic tint of this deep-dyed water, every wavelet of
which, at its crest, seems touched for the fraction of a
second with a flash of indigo; the whole dancing, spar
kling, shimmering hi a glory which words cannot
convey; and on the other side, and far astern, the
subsiding waves calming back to normal in a flare of
robin 's-egg blue.

Our tourist returns to the rim-side hotel to the
ceremony of sunset on Crater Lake, for which the lake
abandons all traditions and clothes itself in gold and

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 187

crimson. And in the morning after looking, before
sunrise, upon a Crater Lake of hard-polished steel
from which a falling rock would surely bounce and
bound away as if on ice, he breakfasts and leaves with
out another look lest repetition dull his priceless mem
ory of an emotional experience which, all in all, can
never come again the same.

It is as impossible to describe Crater Lake as it is
to paint it. Its outlines may be photographed, but
the photograph does not tell the story. Its colors may
be reproduced, but the reproduction is not Crater
Lake. More than any other spot I know, except the
Grand Canyon from its rim, Crater Lake seems to con
vey a glory which is not of line or mass or color or
composition, but which seems to be of the spirit. No
doubt this vivid impression which the stilled observer
seems to acquire with his mortal eye, is born some
how of his own emotion. Somehow he finds himself
in communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this
quality which seems so mysterious that made the
Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake, just as
the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned
the Grand Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly
spiritual quality which makes the lake impossible
either to paint or to describe.

So different is this spectacle from anything else
upon the continent that the first question asked
usually is how it came to be. The answer discloses
one of the most dramatic incidents in the history of
the earth.

i88 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

In the evolution of the Cascades, many have been
the misadventures of volcanoes. Some have been
buried alive in ash and lava, and merged into con
quering rivals. Some have been buried in ice which
now, organized as glaciers, is wearing down their sides.
Some have died of starvation and passed into the hills.
Some have been blown to atoms. Only one in America,
so far as known, has returned into the seething gulf
which gave it birth. That was Mount Mazama.

The processes of creation are too deliberate for
human comprehension. The Mississippi takes five
thousand years to lower one inch its valley's surface.
The making of Glacier National Park required many—
perhaps hundreds — of millions of years. It seems
probable that the cataclysm in which Mount Mazama
disappeared was exceptional; death may have come
suddenly, even as expressed in human terms.

What happened seems to have been this. Some
foundation underpinning gave way in the molten gulf
below, and the vast mountain sank and disappeared
within itself. Imagine the spectacle who can ! Mount
Mazama left a clean-cut rim surrounding the hole
through which it slipped and vanished. But there was
a surging back. The eruptive forces, rebounding,
pushed the shapeless mass again up the vast chimney.
They found it too heavy a load. Deep within the ash-
choked vent burst three small craters, and that was
all. Two of these probably were short-lived, the third
lasted a little longer. And, centuries later, spring
water seeped through, creating Crater Lake.

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 189

Crater Lake is set in the summit of the Cascade
Range, about sixty-five miles north of the California
boundary. The road from the railway-station at Med-
ford leads eighty miles eastward up the picturesque
volcanic valley of the Rogue River. The country is
magnificently forested. The mountains at this point

CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE SHOWING PROBABLE OUTLINE OF
MOUNT MAZAMA

are broad, gently rolling plateaus from which suddenly
rise many volcanic cones, which, seen from elevated
opens, are picturesque in the extreme. Each of these
cones is the top of a volcano from whose summit has
streamed the prehistoric floods of lava which have
filled the intervening valleys, raising and levelling the
country.

Entering the park, a high, broad, forested eleva
tion is quickly encountered which looks at a glance
exactly what it is, the base which once supported a
towering cone. At its summit, this swelling base is
found to be the outside supporting wall of a roughly
circular lake, about five miles in diameter, the inside
wall of which is steeply inclined to the water's surface
a thousand feet below. The strong contrast between
the outer and inner walls tells a plainly read story.

190 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The outer walls, all around, slope gently upward at an
angle of about fifteen degrees; naturally, if carried on,
they would converge in a peaked summit higher than
that of Shasta. The inner walls converge downward
at a steep angle, suggesting a funnel of enormous depth.
It was through this funnel that Mount Mazama, as
men call the volcano that man never saw, once collapsed
into the gulf from which it had emerged.

Studying the scene from the Lodge on the rim
where the automobile-stage has left you, the most vivid
impressions of detail are those of the conformation of
the inner rim, the cliffs which rise above it, and the
small volcano which emerges from the blue waters of
the lake.

The marvellous inner slope of the rim is not a con
tinuous cliff, but a highly diversified succession of
strata. Examination shows the layers of volcanic
conglomerate and lava of which, like layers of brick
and stone, the great structure was built. The down
ward dip of these strata away from the lake is every
where discernible. The volcano's early story thus lies
plain to eyes trained to read it. The most interesting
of these strata is the lava flow which forms twelve
thousand feet of the total precipice of Llao Rock, a
prominence of conspicuous beauty.

Many of these cliffs are magnificently bold. The
loftiest is Glacier Peak, which rises almost two thou
sand feet above the water's surface. But Button Cliff
is a close rival, and Vidae Cliff, Garfield Peak, Llao
Rock, and the Watchman fall close behind. Offsetting

From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company

DUTTON CLIFF AND THE PHANTOM SHIP, CRAf ijfe LAK]?

From a photograph copyright by Scenic America Company

SUNSET FROM GARFIELD PEAK, CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 191

these are breaks where the rim drops within six hundred
feet of the water. The statement of a wall height of a
thousand feet expresses the general impression, though
as an average it is probably well short of the fact.

At the foot of all the walls, at water's edge, lie
slopes of talus, the rocky fragments which erosion has

CROSS-SECTION OF CRATER LAKE

broken loose and dropped into the abyss. Nowhere
is there a beach. The talus shallows the water for a
few hundred feet, and descending streams build small
deltas. These shallows edge the intense blue of the
depths with exquisite lighter tints which tend to green.
But this edging is very narrow.

The next most striking object after the gigantic
carven cliffs is Wizard Island. This complete volcano
in miniature, notwithstanding that it is forest-clothed
and rises from water, carries the traveller's mind in
stantly to the thirteen similar cones which rise within
the enormous desert crater of dead Haleakala, in the
Hawaii National Park. Wizard Island's crater may
easily be seen in the tip of its cone. Its two fellow
volcanoes are invisible four hundred feet under water.

Scanning the blue surface, one's eye is caught by
an interesting sail-like rock rising from the waters on
the far right close to the foot of Button Cliff. This
is the Phantom Ship. Seen two miles away in certain

192 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

lights the illusion is excellent. The masts seem to
tilt rakishly and the sails shine in the sun. There
are times when the Phantom Ship suddenly disappears,
and times again when it as suddenly appears where
nothing was before. Hence its name and mysterious
repute. But there is nothing really mysterious about
this ghostly behavior, which occurs only when the
heated atmosphere lends itself readily to mirage.

Days and weeks of rare pleasure may be had in
the exploration of these amazing walls, a pleasure
greatly to be enhanced by discovering and studying
the many plain evidences of Mazama's slow upbuilding
and sudden extinction. The excellent automobile
road around the rim affords easy approach afoot as
well as by automobile and bicycle. Its passage is
enlivened by many inspiring views of the outlying
Cascades with their great forests of yellow pine and
their lesser volcanic cones, some of which, within and
without the park boundaries, hung upon the flanks of
Mount Mazama while it was belching flame and ash,
while others, easing the checked pressure following the
great catastrophe, were formed anew or enlarged from
older vents.

From this road any part of the fantastic rim may
be reached and explored, often to the water's edge,
by adventurous climbers. What more enjoyable day's
outing, for instance, than the exploration of the splen
did pile of pentagonal basaltic columns suspended half
way in the rim at one point of picturesque beauty?
What more inspiring than the climbing of Dutton

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 193

Cliff, or, for experienced climbers, of many of the
striking lava spires? The only drawback to these
days of happy wandering along this sculptured and
painted rim is the necessity of carrying drinking-water
from the Lodge.

Then there are days of pleasure on the water.
Wizard Island may be thoroughly explored, with
luncheon under its trees by the lakeside. The Phan
tom Ship's gnarled lavas may be examined and climbed.
Everywhere the steep rocky shore invites more in
timate acquaintance; its caves may be entered, some
afoot, at least one afloat. The lake is well stocked
with rainbow trout, some of them descendants of the
youngsters which Will G. Steel laboriously carried
across country from Gordon's Ranch, forty-nine miles
away, in 1888. They are caught with the fly from
shore and boat. A pound trout in Crater Lake is a
small trout. Occasionally a monster of eight or ten
pounds is carried up the trail to the Lodge.

During all these days and weeks of pleasure and
study, the vision of ancient Mount Mazama and its
terrible end grows more and more in the enlightened
imagination. There is much in the conformation of
the base to justify a rather definite picture of this lost
brother of Hood, Shasta, St. Helens, and Rainier. At
the climax of his career, Mazama probably rose six
teen thousand feet above the sea, which means ten
thousand feet above the level of the present lake. We
are justified too in imagining his end a cataclysm.
Volcanic upbuildings are often spasmodic and slow,

i94 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

a series of impulses separated by centuries of quies
cence, but their climaxes often are sudden and exces
sively violent. It seems more probable that Mazama
collapsed during violent eruption. Perhaps like a
stroke of lightning at the moment of triumph, death
came at the supreme climax of his career.

Certainly no mausoleum was ever conceived for
human hero which may be compared for a moment
with this glorified grave of dead Mazama !

The human history of Crater Lake has its inter
est. The Indians feared it. John W. Hillman was
the first white man to see it. Early in 1853 a party of
Californian miners ascended the Rogue River to re
discover a lost gold-mine of fabulous richness. The
expedition was secret, but several Oregonians who sus
pected its object and meant to be in at the finding,
quickly organized and followed. Hillman was of this
party. The Californians soon learned of the pursuit.

"Then," wrote Hillman half a century later, "it
was a game of hide and seek until rations on both sides
got low. The Californians would push through the
brush, scatter, double backward on their trail, and
then camp in the most inaccessible places to be found,
and it sometimes puzzled us to locate and camp near
enough to watch them."

Eventually the rivals united. A combination
search-party was chosen which included Hillman, and
this party, while it found no gold-mine, found Crater
Lake.

"While riding up a long sloping mountain," Hill-

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 195

man continued, "we suddenly came in sight of water
and were very much surprised as we did not expect to
see any lakes. We did not know but what we had
come in sight and close to Klamath Lake, and not until
my mule stopped within a few feet of the rim of Crater
Lake did I look down, and if I had been riding a blind
mule I firmly believe I would have ridden over the edge
to death and destruction. . . .

"The finding of Crater Lake," he concludes, "was
an accident, as we were not looking for lakes; but the
fact of my being the first upon its banks was due to
the fact that I was riding the best saddle mule in
southern Oregon, the property of Jimmy Dobson,
a miner and packer with headquarters at Jackson
ville, who had furnished me the mule in consideration
of a claim to be taken in his name should we be suc
cessful. Stranger to me than our discovery was the
fact that after our return I could get no acknowledg
ment from any Indian, buck or squaw, old or young,
that any such lake existed; each and every one denied
any knowledge of it, or ignored the subject com
pletely."

The next development in Crater's history intro
duces Will G. Steel, widely known as "the Father of
Crater Lake National Park," a pioneer of the highest
type, a gold-seeker in the coast ranges and the Klon
dike, a school-teacher for many years, and a public-
spirited enthusiast. In 1869, a farmer's boy in Kan
sas, he read a newspaper account of an Oregon lake
with precipice sides five thousand feet deep. Moving

196 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

to Oregon in 1871, he kept making inquiries for seven
years before he verified the fact of the lake's existence,
and it was two years later before he found a man who
had seen it. This man's description decided him to
visit it, then an undertaking of some difficulty.

He got there in 1885. Standing on the rim he
suggested to Professor Joseph Le Conte that an effort
be made to induce the national government to save it
from defacement and private exploitation. Return
ing home they prepared a petition to President Cleve
land, who promptly withdrew ten townships from
settlement pending a bill before Congress to create a
national park. Congress refused to pass the bill on
the ground that Oregon should protect her own lake.
Then Steel began an effort, or rather an unbroken
succession of efforts, to interest Congress. For seven
teen years he agitated the project at home, where he
made speeches winter and summer all over the State,
and at Washington, which he deluged with letters and
circulars. Finally the bill was passed. Crater Lake
became a national park on May 22, 1902.

Mr. Steel's work was not finished. He now began
just as vigorous a campaign to have the lake properly
stocked with trout. It required years but succeeded.
Then he began a campaign for funds to build a road
to the lake. This was a stubborn struggle which car
ried him to Washington for a winter, but it finally
succeeded.

During most of this time Mr. Steel was a country
school-teacher without other personal income than his

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 197

salary. He spent many of his summers talking Crater-
Lake projects to audiences in every part of the State,
depending upon his many friends for entertainment
and for "lifts" from town to town. He was superin
tendent of the park from 1913 to the winter of 1920,
when he became United States commissioner for the
park.

The attitude of the Indians toward Crater Lake
remains to be told. Steel is authority for the statement
that previous to 1886 no modern Indian had looked
upon its waters. Legends inherited from their an
cestors made them greatly fear it. I quote O. C.
Applegate's "Klamath Legend of La-o," from Steel
Points for January, 1907:

"According to the mythology of the Klamath and
Modoc Indians, the chief spirit who occupied the mys
tic land of Gaywas, or Crater Lake, was La-o. Under
his control were many lesser spirits who appeared to
be able to change their forms at will. Many of these
were monsters of various kinds, among them the giant
crawfish (or dragon) who could, if he chose, reach up
his mighty arms even to the tops of the cliffs and
drag down to the cold depths of Crater Lake any too
venturesome tourist of the primal days.

"The spirits or beings who were under the con
trol of La-o assumed the forms of many animals of the
present day when they chose to go abroad on dry
land, and this was no less true of the other fabulous
inhabitants of Klamath land who were dominated by
other chief spirits, and who occupied separate locali-

198 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ties; all these forms, however, were largely or solely
subject to the will of Komookumps, the great spirit.

"Now on the north side of Mount Jackson, or
La-o Yaina (La-o's Mountain), the eastern escarp
ment of which is known as La-o Rock, is a smooth field
sloping a little toward the north which was a common
playground for the fabled inhabitants of Gaywas and
neighboring communities.

"Skell was a mighty spirit whose realm was the
Klamath Marsh country, his capital being near the
Yamsay River on the eastern side of the marsh. He
had many subjects who took the form of birds and
beasts when abroad on the land, as the antelope, the
bald eagle, the bliwas or golden eagle, among them
many of the most sagacious and active of all the beings
then upon the earth.

"A fierce war occurred between Skell and La-o
and their followers, which raged for a long time.
Finally Skell was stricken down in his own land of
Yamsay and his heart was torn from his body and
was carried in triumph to La-o Yaina. Then a great
gala day was declared and even the followers of Skell
were allowed to take part in the games on Mount
Jackson, and the heart of Skell was tossed from hand
to hand in the great ball game in which all participated.

"If the heart of Skell could be borne away so that
it could be restored to his body he would live again,
and so with a secret understanding among themselves
the followers of Skell watched for the opportunity to
bear it away. Eventually, when it reached the hands

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 199

of Antelope, he sped away to the eastward like the
wind. When nearly exhausted, he passed it on to
Eagle, and he in turn to Bliwas, and so on, and although
La-o's followers pursued with their utmost speed, they
failed to overtake the swift bearers of the precious
heart. At last they heard the far-away voice of the
dove, another of SkelPs people, and then they gave up
the useless pursuit.

"SkelTs heart was restored and he lived again,
but the war was not over and finally La-o was himself
overpowered and slain and his bleeding body was borne
to the La-o Yaina, on the very verge of the great
cliff, and a false message was conveyed to La-o's mon
sters in the lake that Skell had been killed instead of
La-o, and, when a quarter of the body was thrown
over, La-o's monsters devoured it thinking it a part
of SkelPs body. Each quarter was thrown over in
turn with the same result, but when the head was
thrown into the lake the monsters recognized it as the
head of their master and would not touch it, and so it
remains to-day, an island in the lake, to all people
now known as Wizard Island."

In 1885, at Fort Klamath, Steel obtained from
Allen David, the white-headed chief of the Klamath
Indians, the story of how the Indians returned to
Crater Lake. It was "long before the white man ap
peared to drive the native out." Several Klamaths
while hunting were shocked to find themselves on the
lake rim, but, gazing upon its beauty, suddenly it was
revealed to them that this was the home of the Great

200 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Spirit. They silently left and camped far away. But
one brave under the spell of the lake returned, looked
again, built his camp-fire and slept. The next night he
returned again, and still again. Each night strange
voices which charmed him rose from the lake; mysteri
ous noises filled the air. Moons waxed and waned.
One day he climbed down to the water's edge, where
he saw creatures "like in all respects to Klamath
Indians " inhabiting the waters. Again and again he
descended, bathed, and soon began to feel mysteriously
strong, "stronger than any Indian of his tribe because
of his many visits to the waters."

Others perceiving his growing power ventured also
to visit the lake, and, upon bathing in its waters also
received strength.

"On one occasion," said David solemnly, "the
brave who first visited the lake killed a monster, or
fish, and was at once set upon by untolcl numbers of
excited Llaos (for such they were called), who carried
him to the top of the cliffs, cut his throat with a stone
knife, then tore his body into small pieces which were
thrown down to the waters far beneath and devoured
by angry Llaos."

In 1886 two Klamaths accompanied Captain
Clarence E. Button's Geological Survey party to Crater
Lake and descended to the water's edge. The news
of the successful adventure spread among the Indians,
and others came to look upon the forbidden spot.
That was the beginning of the end of the superstition.
Steel says that two hundred Klamaths camped upon

CRATER LAKE'S BOWL OF INDIGO 201

the rim in 1896, while he was there with the Maza-
mas.

The lake was variously named by its early visitors.
The Hillman party which discovered it named it
Deep Blue Lake on the spot. Later it was known as
Lake Mystery, Lake Majesty, and Hole in the Ground.
A party from Jacksonville named it Crater Lake on
August 4, 1869.

YELLOWSTONE, A VOLCANIC INTERLUDE

THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING, NORTH
WESTERN WYOMING. AREA, 3,348 SQUARE MILES

JOHN COULTER'S story of hot springs at the
upper waters of the Yellowstone River was laughed
at by the public of 1810. Jim Bridgets account of the
geysers in the thirties made his national reputation
as a liar. Warren Angus Ferris's description of the
Upper Geyser Basin was received in 1842 in unbeliev
ing silence. Later explorers who sought the Yellow
stone to test the truth of these tales thought it whole
some to keep their findings to themselves, as maga
zines and newspapers refused to publish their accounts
and lecturers were stoned in the streets as impostors.
It required the authority of the semiofficial Washburn-
Langford expedition of 1869 to establish credence.

The original appeal of the Yellowstone, that to
wonder, remains its most popular appeal to-day,
though science has dissipated mystery these many
years. Many visitors, I am persuaded, enjoy the
wonder of it more even than the spectacle. I have
heard people refuse to listen to the explanation of
geyser action lest it lessen their pleasure in Old Faith
ful. I confess to moods in which I want to see the blue

202

YELLOWSTONE 203

flames and smell the brimstone which Jim Bridger
described so eloquently. There are places where it is
not hard to imagine both.

For many years the uncanny wonders of a dying
volcanic region absorbed the public mind to the ex
clusion of all else in the Yellowstone neighborhood,
which Congress, principally in consequence of these
wonders, made a national park in 1872. Yet all the
time it possessed two other elements of distinction
which a later period regards as equal to the volcanic
phenomena; elements, in fact, of such distinction that
either one alone, without the geysers, would have
warranted the reservation of so striking a region for
a national park. One of these is the valley of the
Yellowstone River with its spectacular waterfalls and
its colorful canyon. The other is its population of
wild animals which, in 1872, probably was as large and
may have been larger than to-day's. Yet little was
heard of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in those
days, although Moran's celebrated painting, now in
the Capitol at Washington, helped influence Congress
to make it a national park; and so little did the wild
animals figure in the calculations of the period that
they were not even protected in the national park
until 1894, when hunting had reduced the buffalo to
twenty-five animals.

Even in these days of enlightenment and apprecia
tion the great majority of people think of the Yellow
stone only as an area enclosing geysers. There are
tourists so possessed with this idea that they barely

204 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

glance at the canyon in passing. I have heard tourists
refuse to walk to Inspiration Point because they had
already looked over the rim at a convenient and un
impressive place. Imagine coming two thousand miles
to balk at two miles and a half to the only spectacle
of its kind in the world and one of the world's great
spectacles at that! As for the animals, few indeed
see any but the occasional bears that feed at the hotel
dumps in the evening.

The Yellowstone National Park lies in the recesses
of the Rocky Mountains in northwestern Wyoming.
It slightly overlaps Montana on the north and north
west, and Idaho on the southwest. It is rectangular,
with an entrance about the middle of each side. It is
the largest of the national parks, enclosing 3,348 square
miles. It occupies a high plain girt with mountains.
The Absarokas bound it on the east, their crest in
vading the park at Mount Chittenden. The Gallatin
Range pushes into the northwestern corner from the
north. The continental divide crosses the south
western corner over the lofty Madison Plateau and the
ridge south of Yellowstone Lake. Altitudes are gen
erally high. The plains range from six to eight thou
sand feet; the mountains rise occasionally to ten
thousand feet. South of the park the Pitchstone
Plateau merges into the foot-hills of the Teton Moun
tains, which, thirty miles south of the southern bound
ary, rise precipitously seven thousand feet above the
general level of the country.

Though occupying the heart of the Rocky Moun-

YELLOWSTONE 205

tains, the region is not of them. In no sense is it
typical. The Rockies are essentially granite which
was forced molten from the depths when, at the crea
tion of this vast central mountain system, lateral
pressures lifted the earth's skin high above sea-level,
folded it, and final] y eroded it along the crest of the
folds. In this granite system the Yellowstone is a
volcanic interlude, and of much later date. It belongs
in a general way to the impulse of volcanic agitation
which lighted vast beacons over three hundred thou
sand square miles of our northwest. The Cascade
Mountains belong in this grouping. Four national
parks of to-day were then in the making, Mount
Rainier in Washington, Crater Lake in Oregon, Lassen
Volcanic in California, and the Yellowstone in Wy
oming. Subterranean heat, remaining from those days
of volcanic activity, to-day boils the water which the
geysers hurl in air.

In the northeastern part of the Yellowstone a large
central crater was surrounded by smaller volcanoes.
You can easily trace the conformation from Mount
Washburn which stood upon its southeastern rim,
heaped there, doubtless, by some explosion of more
than common violence. This volcanic period was of
long duration, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
In the northeastern part of the park the erosion of a
hill has exposed the petrified remains of thirteen large
forests in layers one on top of the other, the deep in
tervening spaces filled with thick deposits of ashes.
Thirteen consecutive times were great forests here

206 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

smothered in the products of eruption. Thirteen
times did years enough elapse between eruptions for
soil to make and forests to grow again, each perhaps
of many generations of great trees.

Yellowstone's mountains, then, are decayed vol
canoes, its rock is lava, its soil is ash and disintegrated
lava. The resulting outline is soft and waving, with
a tendency to levels. There are no pinnacled heights,
no stratified, minareted walls, no precipiced cirques and
glacier-shrouded peaks. Yet glaciers visited the region.
The large granite boulder brought from afar and left
near the west rim of the Grand Canyon with thousands
of feet of rhyolite and other products of volcanism be
neath it is alone sufficient proof of that.

Between the periods from volcano to glacier and
from glacier to to-day, stream erosion has performed
its miracles. The volcanoes have been rounded and
flattened, the plateaus have been built up and levelled,
and the canyons of the Yellowstone, Gibbon, and Mad
ison Rivers have been dug. Vigorous as its landscape
still remains, it has thus become the natural playground
for a multitude of people unaccustomed to the rigors
of a powerfully accented mountain country.

The fact is that, in spite of its poverty of peaks
and precipices, the Yellowstone country is one of the
most varied and beautiful wildernesses in the world.
Among national parks it gains rather than loses by
its difference. While easily penetrated, it is wild in the
extreme, hinting of the prairies in its broad opens,
pasture for thousands of wild ruminants, and of the

YELLOWSTONE 207

loftier mountains in its distant ranges, its isolated
peaks and its groups of rugged, rolling summits. In
the number, magnitude, and variety of its waters it
stands quite alone. It contains no less than three
watersheds of importance, those of the Yellowstone,
Madison, and Snake Rivers, flowing respectively north,
west, and south. The waters of the Yellowstone and
Madison make it an important source of the Missouri.
There are minor rivers of importance in the park
and innumerable lesser streams. It is a network of
waterways. Its waterfalls are many, and two of
them are large and important. Its lakes are many,
and several are large. Yellowstone Lake is the largest
of its altitude in the world.

As a wilderness, therefore, the Yellowstone is un
equalled. Its innumerable waters insure the luxuri
ance of its growths. Its forested parts are densely
forested; its flower-gardens are unexcelled in range,
color, and variety, and its meadows grow deep in many
kinds of rich grass. If it were only for the splendor
of its wilderness, it still would be worth the while.
Imagine this wilderness heavily populated with friendly
wild animals, sprinkled with geysers, hot springs, mud
volcanoes, painted terraces and petrified groves, sen
sational with breath-taking canyons and waterfalls,
penetrable over hundreds of miles of well built road
and several times the mileage of trails, and comforta
ble because of its large hotels and public camps lo
cated conveniently for its enjoyment, and you have a
pleasure-ground of extraordinary quality. Remember

208 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

that one may camp out almost anywhere, and that all
waters are trout waters. Yellowstone offers the best
fishing easily accessible in the continent.

Another advantage possessed by the Yellowstone
is a position near the centre of the country among
great railroad systems. The Northern Pacific reaches
it on the north, the Burlington on the east, and the
Union Pacific on the west. One can take it coming
or going between oceans; it is possible to buy tickets
in by any one railroad and out by either of the others.
An elaborate system of automobile-coaches swings the
passenger where he pleases, meeting all incoming
trains and delivering at all outgoing trains. It is
much easier now to see the Yellowstone than in the
much-vaunted stage-coach times previous to 1915,
times sorely lamented by the romantic because their
passing meant the passing of the picturesque old horse-
drawn stage-coach from its last stand in the United
States; times when a tour of the Yellowstone meant
six and a half days of slow, dusty travel, starting early
and arriving late, with a few minutes or hours at each
"sight" for the soiled and exhausted traveller to gape
in ignorant wonder, watch in hand.

To-day one travels swiftly and comfortably hi
entire leisure, stopping at hotels or camps as he pleases,
and staying at each as long as he likes. The runs
between the lingering places are now a pleasure. If
hurried, one can now accomplish the stage-coach trip
of the past in two days, while the old six and a half
days now means a leisurely and delightful visit.

YELLOWSTONE 209

With the new order of travel began a new con
ception of the Yellowstone's public usefulness. It
ceased to be a museum of wonders and began to be a
summer pleasure-ground. Instead of the fast auto
mobile-stage decreasing the average length of visit,
the new idea which it embodied has lengthened it.
This new idea is a natural evolution which began with
the automobile and spread rapidly. The railroads had
been bringing tourists principally on transcontinental
stop-overs. Automobiles brought people who came
really to see the Yellowstone, who stayed weeks at
public camps to see it, or who brought outfits and
camped out among its spectacles. The first Ford
which entered the park on the morning of August i,
1915, the day when private cars were first admitted,
so loaded with tenting and cooking utensils that the
occupants scarcely could be seen, was the herald of the
new and greater Yellowstone. Those who laughed
and those who groaned at sight of it, and there were
both, were no seers; for that minute Yellowstone en
tered upon her destiny.

The road scheme is simple and effective. From
each entrance a road leads into an oblong loop road
enclosing the centre of the park and touching the prin
cipal points of scenic interest. This loop is connected
across the middle for convenience. From it several
short roads push out to special spectacles, and a long
road follows Lamar Creek through a northeastern en
trance to a mining town which has no other means of
communication with the world outside. This is the

210 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

road to Specimen Ridge with its thirteen engulfed
forests, to the buffalo range, and, outside the park
boundaries, to the Grasshopper Glacier, in whose glassy
embrace may be seen millions of grasshoppers which
have lain in very cold storage indeed from an age be
fore man. All are automobile roads.

The hot-water phenomena are scattered over a
large area of the park. The Mammoth Hot Springs
at the northern entrance are the only active examples
of high terrace-building. The geysers are concentrated
in three adjoining groups upon the middle-west side.
But hot springs occur everywhere at widely separated
points; a steam jet is seen emerging even from the
depths .of the Grand Canyon a thousand feet below
the rim.

The traveller is never long allowed to forget, in
the silent beauty of the supreme wilderness, the park's
uncanny nature. Suddenly encountered columns of
steam rising from innocent meadows; occasional half-
acres of dead and discolored brush emerging from hot
and yellow mud-holes within the glowing forest heart;
an unexpected roaring hillside running with smoking
water; irregular agitated pools of gray, pink, or yellow
mud, spitting, like a pot of porridge, explosive puffs of
steam; the warm vaporing of a shallow in a cold forest-
bound lake; a continuous violent bellowing from the
depths of a ragged roadside hole which at intervals

YELLOWSTONE 211

vomits noisily quantities of thick brown and purple
liquid; occasional groups of richly colored hot springs
in an acre or more of dull yellows, the whole steaming
vehemently and interchanging the pinks and blues of
its hot waters as the passing traveller changes his angle
of vision — these and other uncouth phenomena in
wide variety and frequent repetition enliven the tour
ist's way. They are more numerous in geyser neigh
borhoods, but some of them are met singly, always with
a little shock of surprise, in every part of the park.

The terrace-building springs in the north of the
park engulf trees. The bulky growing mounds of
white and gray deposit are edged with minutely carven
basins mounted upon elaborately fluted supports of
ornate design, over whose many-colored edges flows a
shimmer of hot water. Basin rises upon basin, tier
upon tier, each in turn destined to clog and dry and
merge into the mass while new basins and new tiers
form and grow and glow awhile upon their outer flank.
The material, of course, is precipitated by the water
when it emerges from the earth's hot interior. The
vivid yellows and pinks and blues in which these ter
races clothe themselves upon warm days result from
minute vegetable algae which thrive in the hot satu
rated lime-water but quickly die and fade to gray and
shining white on drying. The height of some of these
shapeless masses of terrace-built structures is surpris
ing. But more surprising yet is the vividness of color
assumed by the limpid springs in certain lights and at
certain angles.

212 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Climbing the terraces at the expense of wet feet,
one stands upon broad, white, and occasionally very
damp plateaus which steam vigorously in spots. These
spots are irregularly circular and very shallow pools of
hot water, some of which bubble industriously with a
low, pleasant hum. They are not boiling springs; the
bubbling is caused by escaping gases; but their waters
are extremely hot. The intense color of some of these
pools varies or disappears with the changing angle of
vision; the water itself is limpid.

Elsewhere throughout the park the innumerable
hot springs seem to be less charged with deposi table
matter; elsewhere they build no terraces, but bubble
joyously up through bowls often many feet in depth
and diameter. Often they are inspiringly beautiful.
The blue Morning Glory Spring is jewel-like rather than
flower-like in its color quality, but its bowl remarkably
resembles the flower which gives it name. Most springs
are gloriously green. Some are the sources of consid
erable streams. Some stir slightly with the feeling
rather than the appearance of life; others are perpet
ually agitated, several small springs betraying their
relationship to the geysers by a periodicity of activity.

When the air is dry and the temperature low, the
springs shoot thick volumes of steam high in air. To
the incomer by the north or west entrance who has yet
to see a geyser, the first view of the Lower Geyser Basin
brings a shock of astonishment no matter what his
expectation. Let us hope it is a cool, bracing, breezy
morning when the broad yellow plain emits hundreds

YELLOWSTONE 213

of columns of heavy steam to unite in a wind-tossed
cloud overlying and setting off the uncanny spectacle.
Several geysers spout vehemently and one or more
roaring vents bellow like angry bulls in a nightmare.
This is appropriately the introduction to the greater
geyser basins which lie near by upon the south.

Who shall describe the geysers ? What pen, what
brush, shall do justice to their ghostly glory, the eager
vehemence of their assaults upon the sky, their joy
ful gush and roar, their insistence upon conscious per
sonality and power, the white majesty of thejir fluted
columns at the instant of fullest expansion, the supreme
loveliness of their feathery florescence at the level of
poise between rise and fall, their graciousness of form,
their speedy airiness of action, their giant convolutions
of sun-flecked steam rolling aloft in ever-expanding
volume to rejoin the parent cloud?

Perhaps there have been greater geyser basins
somewhere in the prehistoric past. There may be
greater still to come; one or two promising possibilities
are in Alaska. But for the lapse of geologic tune in
which man has so far lived, Yellowstone has cornered
the world's geyser market. There are only two other
places where one may enjoy the spectacle of large gey
sers. One of these is New Zealand and the other
Iceland; but both displays combined cannot equal
Yellowstone's either in the number or the size of the
geysers.

Yellowstone has dozens of geysers of many kinds.
They range in size from the little spring that spurts a

2i4 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

few inches every minute to the monster that hurls
hundreds of tons of water three hundred feet in air
every six or eight weeks. Many spout at fairly regular
intervals of minutes or hours or days. Others are
notably irregular, and these include most of the largest.
Old Faithful won its name and reputation by its regu
larity; it is the only one of the group of monsters which
lives up to its time-table. Its period ranges from in
tervals of about fifty-five minutes in seasons following
winters of heavy snow to eighty or eighty-five minutes
in seasons following winters of light snow. Its erup
tions are announced in the Old Faithful Inn a few
minutes in advance of action and the population of the
hotel walks out to see the spouting. At night a search
light is thrown upon the gushing flopd.

After all, Old Faithful is the most satisfactory of
geysers. Several are more imposing. Sometimes en
thusiasts remain in the neighborhood for weeks wait
ing for the Giant to play and dare not venture far
away for fear of missing the spectacle; while Old
Faithful, which is quite as beautiful and nearly as
large, performs hourly for the pleasure of thousands.
Even the most hurried visitor to the Upper Basin is
sure, between stages, of seeing several geysers in addi
tion to one or more performances of Old Faithful.

The greatest of known geysers ceased playing in
1888. I have found no authentic measurements or
other stated records concerning the famous Excelsior.
It hurled aloft an enormous volume of water, with a
fury of action described as appalling. Posterity is

YELLOWSTONE 215

fortunate in the existence of a striking photograph of
this monster taken at the height of its play by F. Jay
Haynes, then official photographer of the park.

"The first photographs I made were in the fall
of 1881," Mr. Haynes writes me. "The eruptions con
tinued during the winter at increasing intervals from
two hours, when the series began, to four hours when
it ceased operations before the tourist season of 1882.
Not having the modern photographic plates for in
stantaneous work in 1881, it was impossible to secure
instantaneous views then, but in the spring of 1888,
I made the view which you write about. It was taken
at the fulness of its eruption.

"The explosion was preceded by a rapid filling
of the crater and a great overflow of water. The
column was about fifty feet wide and came from the
centre of the crater. Pieces of formation were torn
loose and were thrown out during each eruption; large
quantities eventually were removed from the crater,
thus enlarging it to its present size."

Here we have a witness's description of the process
which clouds the career of the Excelsior Geyser. The
enlargement of the vent eventually gave unrestrained
passage to the imprisoned steam. The geyser ceased
to play. To-day the Excelsior Spring is one of the
largest hot springs in the Yellowstone and the world;
its output of steaming water is constant and volumi
nous. Thus again we find relationship between the hot
spring and the geyser; it is apparent that the same
vent, except perhaps for differences of internal shaping,

216 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

might serve for both. It was the removal of restrain
ing walls which changed the Excelsior Geyser to the
Excelsior Spring.

For many years geyser action remained a mystery
balanced among conflicting theories, of which at last
Bunsen's won general acceptance. Spring waters, or
surface waters seeping through porous lavas, gather
thousands of feet below the surface in some pocket
located in strata which internal pressures still keep
hot. Boiling as they gather, the waters rise till they
fill the long vent-hole to the surface. Still the steam
keeps making in the deep pocket, where it is held down
by the weight of the water in the vent above. As it
accumulates this steam compresses more and more.
The result is inevitable. There comes a moment when
the expansive power of the compressed steam over
comes the weight above. Explosion follows. The
steam, expanding now with violence, drives the water
up the vent and out; nor is it satisfied until the vent
is emptied.

Upon the surface, as the geyser lapses and dies,
the people turn away to the Inn and luncheon. Un
der the surface, again the waters gather and boil in
preparation for the next eruption. The interval till
then will depend upon the amount of water which
reaches the deep pocket, the size of the pocket, and the
length and shape of the vent-hole. If conditions per
mit the upward escape of steam as fast as it makes in
the pocket, we have a hot spring. If the steam makes
faster than it can escape, we have a geyser.

From a photograph by Haynes t j , j >

THE EXCELSIOR GEYSER WHICH BLEW OUT IN 1883 ^YELLOWSTONE

From a photograph by Haynes

ONE OF THE TERRACES AT MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS; YELLOWSTONE

YELLOWSTONE 217

III

So interesting are the geysers and their kin that,
with their splendid wilderness setting, other glories
seem superfluous. I have had my moments of impa
tience with the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone for
being in the Yellowstone. Together, the canyon and
the geysers are almost too much for one place, even
perhaps for one visit. One can only hold so much,
even of beauty, at once. Spectacles of this quality
and quantity need assimilation, and assimilation re
quires time. Nevertheless, once enter into sympathet
ic relations with the canyon, once find its heart and
penetrate its secret, and the tables are quickly turned.
Strangely, it now becomes quite easy to view with
comparative coolness the claims of mere hot-water
wonders.

The canyon cannot be considered apart from its
river any more than a geyser apart from its environ
ment of hot spring and basin, and any consideration
of the Yellowstone River begins with its lake. As
compared with others of scenic celebrity, Yellowstone
Lake is unremarkable. Its shores are so low and
the mountains of its southern border so flat and un-
suggestive that it curiously gives the impression of
surface altitude — curiously because it actually has the
altitude; its surface is more than seven thousand seven
hundred feet above tide. If I have the advertisement
right, it is the highest water in the world that floats a
line of steamboats.

218 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The lake is large, twenty miles north and south
by fifteen miles east and west; it is irregular with deep
indentations. It is heavily wooded to the water's
edge. All its entering streams are small except the
Yellowstone River, which, from its source in the
Absarokas just south of the park boundary, enters
the Southeast Arm through the lowland wilderness
home of the moose and the wild buffalo. The lake
is the popular resort of thousands of large white peli
cans, its most picturesque feature.

That part of the Yellowstone River which inter
ests us emerges from the lake at its most northerly
point. It is here a broad swift stream of some depth
and great clarity, so swarming with trout that a half-
dozen or more usually may be seen upon its bottom
at any glance from boat or bridge. A number of boats
usually are anchored above the bridge from which
anglers are successfully trailing artificial flies and spin
ners in the fast current; and the bridge is usually lined
with anglers who, in spite of crude outfits, frequently
hook good trout which they pull up by main strength
much [as the phlegmatic patrons of excursion-steamers
to the Banks yank flopping cod from brine to basket
on the top deck.

The last time I crossed the Fishing Bridge and
paused to see the fun, a woman whose face beamed
with happiness held up a twenty-inch trout and
said:

"Just look ! My husband caught this and he is
seventy-six years old — last month. It's the first fish

YELLOWSTONE 219

he ever caught, for he was brought up in Kansas, you
know, where there isn't any fishing. My ! but he's a
proud man ! We're going to get the camp to cook it
for us. He's gone now to look for a board to draw
its measurements to show the folks at home."

From here to the river's emergence from the park
the fishing is not crude. In fact, it taxes the most
skilful angler's art to steer his fighting trout through
boiling rapids to the net. For very soon the Yellow
stone narrows and pitches down sharper slants to the
climax of the falls and the mighty canyon.

This intermediate stretch of river is beautiful in
its quietude. The forests often touch the water's
edge. And ever it narrows and deepens and splashes
higher against the rocks which stem its current; for
ever it is steepening to the plunge. Above the Upper
Fall it pinches almost to a mill-race, roars over low
sills, swings eastward at right angles, and plunges a
hundred and nine feet. I know of no cataract which
expresses might in action so eloquently as the Upper
Fall of the Yellowstone. Pressed as it is within nar
row bounds, it seems to gush with other motive power
than merely gravity. Seen from above looking down,
seen sideways from below, or looked at straight on
from the camp site on the opposite rim, the water ap
pears hurled from the brink.

Less than a mile south of the Upper Fall, the river
again falls, this time into the Grand Canyon.

Imposing as the Great Fall is, it must chiefly be
considered as a part of the Grand Canyon picture.

220 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The only separate view of it looks up from the river's
edge in front, a view which few get because of the diffi
cult climb; every other view poses it merely as an ele
ment in the canyon composition. Compared with the
Upper Fall, its more than double height gives it the
great superiority of majesty without detracting from
the Upper Fall's gushing personality. In fact, it is the
King of Falls. Comparison with Yosemite's falls is
impossible, so different are the elements and conditions.
The Great Fall of the Yellowstone carries in one body,
perhaps, a greater bulk of water than all the Yosemite
Valley's falls combined.

And so we come to the canyon. In figures it is
roughly a thousand feet deep and twice as wide, more
or less, at the rim. The supremely scenic part reaches
perhaps three miles below the Great Fall. Several
rock points extend far into the canyon, from which
the gorgeous spectacle may be viewed as from an aero
plane. Artists' Point, which is reached from the east
side, displays the Great Fall as the centre of a noble
composition. It was Moran's choice. Inspiration
Point, which juts far in from the west side, shows a
deeper and more comprehensive view of the canyon
and only a glimpse of the Great Fall. Both views are
essential to any adequate conception. From Artists'
Point the eye loses detail in the overmastering glory of
the whole. From Inspiration Point the canyon re
veals itself in all the intimacy of its sublime form and
color. Both views dazzle and astonish. Neither can
be looked at very long at one time.

From a photograph copyright by Gifford

YELLOWSTONE VALLEY FROM THE UPPER FALL TO THE LOWER FALL

From a photograph copyright by Gifford

THE LOWER FALL AND THE GRAND CANYON OF THE YELLOWSTONE

YELLOWSTONE 221

It will help comprehension of the picture quality
of this remarkable canyon to recall that it is carved
out of the products of volcanism; its promontories and
pinnacles are the knobbed and gnarled decomposition
products of lava rocks left following erosion; its sides
are gashed and fluted lava cliffs flanked by long straight
slopes of coarse volcanic sand-like grains ; its colors have
the distinctness and occasional luridness which seem
natural to fused and oxidized disintegrations. Geo
logically speaking, it is a young canyon. It is dig
ging deeper all the time.

Yellow, of course, is the prevailing color. Moran
was right. His was the general point of view, his mes
sage the dramatic ensemble. But, even from Artists'
Point, closer looking reveals great masses of reds and
grays, while Inspiration Point discloses a gorgeous
palette daubed with most of the colors and interme
diate tints that imagination can suggest. I doubt
whether there is another such kaleidoscope in nature.
There is apparently every gray from purest white to
dull black, every yellow from lemon to deep orange,
every red, pink, and brown. These tints dye the rocks
and sands in splashes and long transverse streaks
which merge into a single joyous exclamation in vivid
color whose red and yellow accents have something of
the Oriental. Greens and blues are missing from the
dyes, but are otherwise supplied. The canyon is edged
with lodge-pole forests, and growths of lighter greens
invade the sandy slants, at times nearly to the froth
ing river; and the river is a chain of emeralds and

222 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

pearls. Blue completes the color gamut from the in
verted bowl of sky.

No sketch of the canyon is complete without the
story of the great robbery. I am not referring to the
several hold-ups of the old stage-coach days, but to a
robbery which occurred long before the coming of man
— the theft of the waters of Yellowstone Lake; for
this splendid river, these noble falls, this incomparable
canyon, are the ill-gotten products of the first of Yellow
stone's hold-ups.

Originally Yellowstone Lake was a hundred and
sixty feet higher and very much larger than it is to-day.
It extended from the headwaters of the present Yel
lowstone River, far in the south, northward past the
present Great Fall and Inspiration Point. It included
a large part of what is now known as the Hayden
Valley. At that time the Continental Divide, which
now cuts the southwest corner of the park, encircled
the lake on its north, and just across the low divide
was a small flat-lying stream which drained and still
drains the volcanic slopes leading down from Dun-
raven Peak and Mount Washburn.

This small stream, known as Sulphur Creek, has
the honor, or the dishonor if you choose, of being the
first desperado of the Yellowstone, but one so much
greater than its two petty imitators of human times
that there is no comparison of misdeeds. Sulphur
Creek stole the lake from the Snake River and used
it to create the Yellowstone River, which in turn
created the wonderful canyon. Here at last is a

YELLOWSTONE 223

crime in which all will agree that the end justified the
means.

How this piracy was accomplished is written on
the rocks; even the former lake outlet into the Snake
River is plainly discernible to-day. At the lake's north
end, where the seeping waters of Sulphur Creek and
the edge of the lake nearly met on opposite sides of
what was then the low flat divide, it only required
some slight disturbance indirectly volcanic, some un
accustomed rising of lake levels, perhaps merely some
special stress of flood or storm to make the connection.
Perhaps the creek itself, sapping back in the soft lava
soils, unaided found the lake. Connection once made,
the mighty body of lake water speedily deepened a
channel northward and Sulphur Creek became sure
of its posterity.

At that time, hidden under the lake's surface, two
rhyolite dikes, or upright walls of harder rock, extended
crosswise through the lake more than half a mile apart.
As the lake-level fell, the nearer of these dikes emerged
and divided the waters into two lakes, the upper of
which emptied over the dike into the lower. This was
the beginning of the Great Fall. And presently, as
the Great Fall cut its breach deeper and deeper into
the restraining dike, it lowered the upper-lake level
until presently the other rhyolite dike emerged from
the surface carrying another cataract. And thus be
gan the Upper Fall.

Meantime the stream below kept digging deeper
the canyon of Sulphur Creek, and there came a time

224 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

when the lower lake drained wholly away. In its place
was left a bottom-land which is now a part of the Hay-
den Valley, and, running through it, a river. Forth
with this river began scooping, from the Great Fall to
Inspiration Point, the scenic ditch which is world-cele
brated to-day as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Now imagine this whole superlative wilderness
heavily populated with wild animals in a state of
normal living. Imagine thirty thousand elk, for in
stance, roaming about in bands of half a dozen to half
a thousand. Imagine them not friendly, perhaps, but
fearless, with that entire indifference which most
animals show to creatures which neither help nor harm
them — as indifferent, say, as the rabbits in your pas
ture or the squirrels in your oak woods. Imagine all
the wild animals, except the sneaking, predatory kind,
proportionally plentiful and similarly fearless — bear,
antelope, mountain- sheep, deer, bison, even moose in
the fastnesses, to say nothing of the innumerable
smaller beasts. There has been no hunting of harm
less animals in the Yellowstone since 1894, and this is
one result.

It is true that comparatively few visitors see many
animals, but that is the fault of their haste or their
temperament or their inexperience of nature. One
must seek in sympathy to find. Tearing over the
wilderness roads in noisy motors smelling of gasolene

YELLOWSTONE 225

is not the best way to find them, although the elk and
deer became indifferent to automobiles as soon as
they discovered them harmless. One may see them
not infrequently from automobiles and often from
horse-drawn wagons; and one may see them often
and intimately who walks or rides horseback on the
trails.

The admission of the automobile to Yellowstone
roads changed seeing conditions materially. In five
days of quiet driving in 1914 with Colonel L. M. Brett,
then superintendent of the park, in a direction op
posite to the stages, I saw more animals from my
wagon-seat than I had expected to see wild in all my
life. We saw bear half a dozen times, elk in numbers,
black-tailed and white-tailed deer so frequently that
count was lost the second morning, four bands of an
telope, buffalo, foxes, coyotes, and even a bull moose.
Once we stopped so as not to hurry a large bear and
two cubs which were leisurely crossing the road.
Deer watched us pass within a hundred yards. Elk
grazed at close quarters, and our one bull moose
obligingly ambled ahead of us along the road. There
was never fear, never excitement (except my own),
not even haste. Even the accustomed horses no more
than cocked an ear or two while waiting for three wild
bears to get out of the middle of the road.

Of course scenic completeness is enough in itself
to justify the existence of these animals in the marvel
lous wilderness of the Yellowstone. Their presence
in normal abundance and their calm at-homeness per-

226 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

fects nature's spectacle. In this respect, also, Yellow
stone's unique place among the national parks is secure.

The lessons of the Yellowstone are plain. It
is now too late to restore elsewhere the great nat
ural possession which the thoughtless savagery of a
former generation destroyed in careless ruth, but,
thanks to this early impulse of conservation, a fine
example still remains in the Yellowstone. But it is
not too late to obliterate wholly certain misconcep
tions by which that savagery was then justified. It
is not too late to look upon wild animals as fellow heri
tors of the earth, possessing certain natural rights which
men are glad rather than bound to respect. It is not
too late to consider them, with birds and forests, lakes,
rivers, seas, and skies, a part of nature's glorious gift
for man's manifold satisfaction, a gift to carefully con
serve for the study and enjoyment of to-day, and to
develop for the uses of larger and more appreciative
generations to come.

Of course if this be brought to universal accom
plishment (and the impulse has been advancing fast
of late), it must be Yellowstone's part to furnish the
exhibit, for we have no other.

To many the most surprising part of Yellowstone's
wild-animal message is man's immunity from hatred
and harm by predatory beasts. To know that wild
bears if kindly treated are not only harmless but
friendly, that grizzlies will not attack except in self-
defense, and that wolves, wild cats, and mountain-
lions fly with that instinctive dread which is man's

YELLOWSTONE 227

dependable protection, may destroy certain romantic
illusions of youth and discredit the observation if
not the conscious verity of many an honest hunter;
but it imparts a modern scientific fact which sets
the whole wild-animal question in a new light. In
every case of assault by bears where complete evi
dence has been obtainable, the United States Biological
Survey, after fullest investigation, has exonerated
the bear; he has always been attacked or has had
reason to believe himself attacked. In more than
thirty summers of field-work Vernon Bailey, Chief
Field-Naturalist of the Biological Survey, has slept
on the ground without fires or other protection,
and frequently in the morning found tracks of in
vestigating predatory beasts. There are reports but
no records of human beings killed by wolves or moun
tain-lions in America. Yet, for years, all reports sus
ceptible of proof have been officially investigated.

One of Yellowstone's several manifest destinies
is to become the well-patronized American school of
wild-life study. Already, from its abundance, it is
supplying wild animals to help in the long and difficult
task of restoring here and there, to national parks and
other favorable localities, stocks which existed before
the great slaughter.

Thirty miles south of this rolling volcanic inter
lude the pristine Rockies, as if in shame of their mo
ment of gorgeous softness, rear in contrast their sharp
est and most heroic monument of bristling granite.

228 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Scarcely over the park's southern boundary, the foot
hills of the Teton Mountains swell gently toward their
Gothic climax. The country opens and roughens.
The excellent road, which makes Jackson's Hole a prac
tical part of the Yellowstone pleasure-ground, winds
through a rolling, partly wooded grazing-ground of
elk and deer. The time was when these wild herds
made living possible for the nation's hunted despera
does, for Jackson's Hole was the last refuge to yield
to law and order.

At the climax of this sudden granite protest, the
Grand Teton rises 7,014 feet in seeming sheerness
from Jackson Lake to its total altitude of 13,747 feet.
To its right is Mount Moran, a monster only less.
The others, clustering around them, have no names.

All together, they are few and grouped like the
units of some fabulous barbaric stronghold. Fitted
by size and majesty to be the climax of a mighty range,
the Tetons concentrate their all in this one giant
group. Quickly, north and south, they subside and
pass. They are a granite island in a sea of plain.

Seen across the lake a dozen miles which seem but
three, these clustered steepled temples rise sheer from
the water. Their flanks are snow-streaked still in
August, their shoulders hung with glaciers, their spires
bare and shining. A greater contrast to the land from
which we came and to which we presently return
cannot be imagined. Geologically, the two have
nothing in common. Scenically, the Tetons set off
and complete the spectacle of the Yellowstone.

From a photograph by Charles D. Walcott

THE TETON MOUNTAIN FROM JACKSON HOLE, SOUTjLlQb'1

•I

From a photograph by Ilaynes

THE LAVA LANDSCAPE OF THE YELLOWSTONE AND GIBBON FALLS

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII

HAWAII NATIONAL PARK, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.
AREA, 118 SQUARE MILES

IF this chapter is confined to the three volcano tops
which Congress reserved on the islands of Hawaii
and Maui in 1917, wonderful though these are, it will
describe a small part indeed of the wide range of
novelty, charm, and beauty which will fall to the lot
of those who visit the Hawaii National Park. One of
the great advantages enjoyed by this national park,
as indeed by Mount McKinley's, is its location in a
surrounding of entire novelty, so that in addition to
the object of his visit, itself so supremely worth while,
the traveller has also the pleasure of a trip abroad.

In novelty at least the Hawaii National Park has
the advantage over the Alaskan park because it in
volves the life and scenery of the tropics. We can
find snow-crowned mountains and winding glaciers at
home, but not equatorial jungles, sandalwood groves,
and surf-riding.

Enormous as this element of charm unquestion
ably is, this is not the place to sing the pleasures of
the Hawaiian Islands. Their palm-fringed horizons,

surf-edged coral reefs, tropical forests and gardens,

229

230 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

plantations of pineapple and sugar-cane are as cele
brated as their rainbows, earthquakes, and graceful
girls dancing under tropical stars to the languorous
ukelele.

Leaving these and kindred spectacles to the steam
ship circulars and the library shelf, it is our part to

MAP OF HAWAII NATIONAL PARK

note that the Hawaii National Park possesses the fourth
largest volcanic crater in the world, whose aspect at
sunrise is one of the world's famous spectacles, the
largest active volcano in the world, and a lake of tur
bulent, glowing, molten lava, "the House of Ever
lasting Fire," which fills the beholder with awe.

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 231

It was not at all, then, the gentle poetic aspects
of the Hawaiian Islands which led Congress to create
a national park there, though these form its romantic,
contrasted setting. It was the extraordinary volcanic
exhibit, that combination of thrilling spectacles of
Nature's colossal power which for years have drawn
travellers from the four quarters of the earth. The
Hawaii National Park includes the summits of Hale-
akala, on the island of Maui, and Mauna Loa and
Kilauea, on the island of Hawaii.

Spain claims the discovery of these delectable
isles by Juan Gaetano, in 1555, but their formal dis
covery and exploration fell to the lot of Captain James
Cook, in 1778. The Hawaiians thought him a god
and loaded him with the treasures of the islands, but
on his return the following year his illness and the con
duct of his crew ashore disillusioned them; they killed
him and burned his flesh, but their priests deified his
bones, nevertheless. Parts of these were recovered
later and a monument was erected over them. Then
civil wars raged until all the tribes were conquered,
at the end of the eighteenth century, by one chieftain,
Kamehameha, who became king. His descendants
reigned until 1874 when, the old royal line dying out,
Kalakaua was elected his successor.

From this time the end hastened. A treaty with
the United States ceded Pearl Harbor as a coaling-sta
tion and entered American goods free of duty, in return
for which Hawaiian sugar and a few other products en
tered the United States free. This established the

232 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

sugar industry on a large and permanent scale and
brought laborers from China, Japan, the Azores, and
Madeira. More than ten thousand Portuguese mi
grated to the islands, and the native population began
a comparative decrease which still continues.

After Kalakaua's death, his sister Liliuokalani
succeeding him in 1891, the drift to the United States
became rapid. When President Cleveland refused
to annex the islands, a republic was formed in 1894,
but the danger from Japanese immigration became
so imminent that in 1898, during the Spanish- American
War, President McKinley yielded to the Hawaiian
request and the islands were annexed to the United
States by resolution of Congress.

The setting for the picture of our island-park will
be complete with several facts about its physical origin.
The Hawaiian Islands rose from the sea in a series of
volcanic eruptions. Originally, doubtless, the greater
islands were simple cones emitting lava, ash, and
smoke, which coral growths afterward enlarged and
enriched. Kauai was the first to develop habitable
conditions, and the island southeast of it followed in
order. Eight of the twelve are now habitable.

The most eastern island of the group is Hawaii.
It is also much the largest. This has three volcanoes.
Mauna Loa, greatest of the three, and also the greatest
volcanic mass in the world, is nearly the centre of the
island; Kilauea lies a few miles east of it; the summits
of both are included in the national park. Mauna
Kea, a volcanic cone of great beauty in the north cen-

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 233

tre of the island, forming a triangle with the other
two, is not a part of the national park.

Northwest of Hawaii across sixty miles or more of
salt water is the island of Maui, second largest of the
group. In its southern part rises the distinguished
volcano of Haleakala, whose summit and world-famous
crater is the third member of the national park. The
other habited islands, in order westward, are Kahoo-
lawe, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu, Kauai, and Niihau; no
portions of these are included in the park. Kahoo-
lawe, Lanai, and Niihau are much the smallest of the
group.

HALEAKALA

Of the three volcanic summits which concern us,
Haleakala is nearest the principal port of Honolulu,
though not always the first visited. Its slopes nearly
fill the southern half of the island of Maui.

The popular translation of the name Haleakala is
"The House of the Sun"; literally the word means
"The House Built by the Sun." The volcano is a
monster of more than ten thousand feet, which bears
upon its summit a crater of a size and beauty that
make it one of the world's show-places. This crater
is seven and a half miles long by two and a third
miles wide. Only three known craters exceed Halea-
kala's in size. Aso san, the monster crater of Japan,
largest by far in the world, is fourteen miles long by
ten wide and contains many farms. Lago di Bolseno,
in Italy, next in size, measures eight and a half by seven

234 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

and a half miles; and Monte Albano, also in Italy,
eight by seven miles.

Exchanging your automobile for a saddle-horse at
the volcano's foot, you spend the afternoon in the
ascent. Wonderful indeed, looking back, is the grow
ing arc of plantation and sea, islands growing upon the
horizon, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa lifting distant
snow-tipped peaks. You spend the night in a rest-
house on the rim of the crater, but not until you have
seen the spectacle of sunset; and in the gray of the
morning you are summoned to the supreme spectacle
of sunrise. Thousands have crossed seas for Halea-
kala's sunrise.

That first view of the crater from the rim is one
never to be forgotten. Its floor lies two thousand
feet below, an enormous rainless, rolling plain from
which rise thirteen volcanic cones, clean-cut, as regular
in form as carven things. Several of these are seven
hundred feet in height. "It must have been awe-
inspiring," writes Castle, "when its cones were spouting
fire, and rivers of scarlet molten lava crawled along the
floor."

The stillness of this spot emphasizes its emo
tional effect. A word spoken ordinarily loud is like
a shout. You can hear the footsteps of the goats far
down upon the crater floor. Upon this floor grow
plants known nowhere else; they are famous under
the name of Silver Swords — yucca-like growths three
or four feet high whose drooping filaments of bloom
gleam like polished silver stilettos.

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 235

When Mark Twain saw the crater, "vagrant
white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea
and valley; then they came in couples and groups;
then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their
forces, they banked themselves solidly together a
thousand feet under us and totally shut out land and
ocean; not a vestige of anything was left in view, but
just a little of the rim of the crater circling away from
the pinnacle whereon we sat, for a ghostly procession
of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted
through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round
and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together
till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog.
Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned.
Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy folds,
with shallow creases between, and with here and there
stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves
aloft out of the common plain — some near at hand,
some in the middle distances, and others relieving the
monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little
conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech.
I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment,
and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of
a vanished world."

The extraordinary perfection of this desert crater
is probably due to two causes. Vents which tapped it
far down the volcano's flanks prevented its filling with
molten lava; absence of rain has preserved its walls
intact and saved its pristine beauty from the deface
ment of erosion.

236 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Haleakala has its legend, and this Jack London
has sifted to its elements and given us in "The Cruise
of the Snark." I quote:

"It is told that long ago, one Maui, the son of
Hina, lived on what is now known as West Maui.
His mother, Hina, employed her time in the making
of kapas. She must have made them at night, for
her days were ocdipied in trying to dry the kapas.
Each morning, and all morning, she toiled at spreading
them out in the sun. But no sooner were they out
than she began taking them in in order to have them
all under shelter for the night. For know that the
days were shorter then than now. Maui watched his
mother's futile toil and felt sorry for her. He decided
to do something — oh, no, not to help her hang out and
take in the kapas. He was too clever for that. His
idea was to make the sun go slower. Perhaps he was
the first Hawaiian astronomer. At any rate, he took
a series of observations of the sun from various parts
of the island. His conclusion was that the sun's path
was directly across Haleakala. Unlike Joshua, he
stood in no need of divine assistance. He gathered a
huge quantity of cocoanuts, from the fibre of which he
braided a stout cord, and in one end of which he made
a noose, even as the cowboys of Haleakala do to this
day.

"Next he climbed into the House of the Sun.
When the sun came tearing along the path, bent on
completing its journey in the shortest time possible,
the valiant youth threw his lariat around one of the

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 237

sun's largest and strongest beams. He made the sun
slow down some; also, he broke the beam short off.
And he kept on roping and breaking off beams till the
sun said it was willing to listen to reason. Maui set
forth his terms of peace, which the sun accepted,
agreeing to go more slowly thereafter. Wherefore
Hina had ample time in which to dry her kapas, and
the days are longer than they used to be, which last
is quite in accord with the teachings of modern as
tronomy."

MAUNA LOA

Sixty miles south of Maui, Hawaii, largest of the
island group, contains the two remaining parts of our
national park. From every point of view Mauna
Loa and Mauna Kea, both snow-crowned monsters
approaching fourteen thousand feet of altitude, dom
inate the island. But Mauna Kea is not a part of the
national park; Kilauea, of less than a third its height,
shares that honor with Mauna Loa. Of the two,
Kilauea is much the older, and doubtless was a con
spicuous figure in the old landscape. It has been
largely absorbed in the immense swelling bulk of
Mauna Loa, which, springing later from the island
soil near by, no doubt diverting Kilauea's vents far
below sea-level, has sprawled over many miles. So
nearly has the younger absorbed the older, that
Kilauea's famous pit of molten lava seems almost to
lie upon Mauna Loa's slope.

Mauna Loa soars 13,675 feet. Its snowy dome

238 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

shares with Mauna Kea, which rises even higher, the
summit honors of the islands. From Hilo, the principal
port of the island of Hawaii, Mauna Loa suggests the
back of a leviathan, its body hidden in the mists.
The way up, through forests of ancient mahogany
and tangles of giant tree-fern, then up many miles of
lava slopes, is one of the inspiring tours in the moun
tain world. The summit crater, Mokuaweoweo, three-
quarters of a mile long by a quarter mile wide, is as
spectacular in action as that of Kilauea.

This enormous volcanic mass has grown of its own
output in comparatively a short time. For many
decades it has been extraordinarily frequent in erup
tion. Every five ox ten years it gets into action with
violence, sometimes at the summit, oftener of recent
years since the central vent has lengthened, at weak
ened places on its sides. Few volcanoes have been so
regularly and systematically studied.

KILAUEA

The most spectacular exhibit of the Hawaii
National Park is the lake of fire in the crater of Kilauea.

Kilauea is unusual among volcanoes. It follows
few of the popular conceptions. Older than the tower
ing Mauna Loa, its height is only four thousand feet.
Its lavas have found vents through its flanks, which
they have broadened and flattened. Doubtless its
own lavas have helped Mauna Loa's to merge the two
mountains into one. It is no longer explosive like the
usual volcano; since 1790, when it destroyed a native

From a photograph copyright by E. M. Xewman - -> j,

THE KILAUEA PIT OF FIRE, HAWAII NATIONAL PARK ' '

Photographed at night by the light of its flaming lava^ ' * *

From a photograph copyright by Newman Travel Talks and Brown and Dawson
WITHIN THE CRATER OF KILAUEA

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 239

army, it has ejected neither rocks nor ashes. Its
crater is no longer definitely bowl-shaped. From the
middle of a broad flat plain, which really is what is
left of the ancient great crater, drops a pit with ver
tical sides within which boil its lavas.

The pit, the lake of fire, is Halemaumau, com
monly translated "The House of Everlasting Fire";
the correct translation is "The House of the Maumau
Fern," whose leaf is twisted and contorted like some
forms of lava. Two miles and a little more from
Halemaumau, on a part of the ancient crater wall,
stands the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, which is
under the control of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The observatory was built for the
special purpose of studying the pit of fire, the risings
and fallings of whose lavas bear a relationship toward
the volcanism of Mauna Loa which is scientifically
important, but which we need not discuss here.

The traveller enters Hawaii by steamer through
Hilo. He reaches the rim of Kilauea by automobile,
an inspiring run of thirty-one miles over a road of vol
canic glass, bordered with vegetation strange to eyes
accustomed only to that of the temperate zone — bril
liant hibiscus, native hardwood trees with feathery
pompons for blossoms, and the giant ferns which tower
overhead. On the rim are the hotels and the observa
tory. Steam- jets emerge at intervals, and hot sulphur
banks exhibit rich yellows. From there the way de
scends to the floor of the crater and unrolls a ribbon
of flower-bordered road seven miles long to the pit of

240 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

fire. By trail, the distance is only two miles and a
half across long stretches of hard lava congealed in
ropes and ripples and strange contortions. Where else
is a spectacle one-tenth as appalling so comfortably
and quickly reached ?

Halemaumau is an irregular pit a thousand feet
long with perpendicular sides. Its depth varies.
Sometimes one looks hundreds of feet down to the
boiling surface; sometimes its lavas overrun the top.
The fumes of sulphur are very strong, with the wind in
your face. At these times, too, the air is extremely
hot. There are cracks in the surrounding lava where
you can scorch paper or cook a beefsteak.

Many have been the attempts to describe it. Not
having seen it myself, I quote two here; one a careful
picture by a close student of the spectacle, Mr. William
R. Castle, Jr., of Honolulu; the other a rapid sketch
by Mark Twain.

"By daylight/1 writes Castle, "the lake of fire is
a greenish-yellow, cut with ragged cracks of red that
look like pale streaks of stationary lightning across its
surface. It is restless, breathing rapidly, bubbling up
at one point and sinking down in another; throwing
up sudden fountains of scarlet molten lava that play
a few minutes and subside, leaving shimmering mounds
which gradually settle to the level surface of the lake,
turning brown and yellow as they sink.

"But as the daylight fades the fires of the pit
shine more brightly. Mauna Loa, behind, becomes a
pale, gray-blue, insubstantial dome, and overhead stars

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 241

begin to appear. As darkness comes the colors on
the lake grow so intense that they almost hurt. The
fire is not only red; it is blue and purple and orange
and green. Blue flames shimmer and dart about the
edges of the pit, back and forth across the surface of
the restless mass. Sudden fountains paint blood-red
the great plume of sulphur smoke that rises con
stantly, to drift away across the poisoned desert of
Kau. Sometimes the spurts of lava are so violent, so
exaggerated by the night, that one draws back terri
fied lest some atom of their molten substance should
spatter over the edge of the precipice. Sometimes the
whole lake is in motion. Waves of fire toss and bat
tle with each other and dash in clouds of bright ver
milion spray against the black sides of the pit. Some
times one of these sides falls in with a roar that echoes
back and forth, and mighty rocks are swallowed in
the liquid mass of fire that closes over them in a whirl
pool, like water over a sinking ship.

"Again everything is quiet, a thick scum forms
over the surface of the lake, dead, like the scum on
the surface of a lonely forest pool. Then it shivers.
Flashes of fire dart from side to side. The centre
bursts open and a huge fountain of lava twenty feet
thick and fifty high, streams into the air and plays for
several minutes, waves of blinding fire flowing out
from it, dashing against the sides until the black rocks
are starred all over with bits of scarlet. To the spec
tator there is, through it all, no sense of fear. So in
tense, so tremendous is the spectacle that silly little

242 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

human feelings find no place. All sensations are sub
merged in a sense of awe."

Mark Twain gazed into Halemaumau's terrifying
depths. "It looked," he writes, "like a colossal rail
road-map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain
lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a
coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of
angry fire !

"Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred
feet in diameter, broken in the dark crust, and in them
the melted lava — the color a dazzling white just tinged
with yellow — was boiling and surging furiously; and
from these holes branched numberless bright torrents
in many directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and kept
a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept
round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succes
sion of sharp worm-fence angles, which looked pre
cisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. Those streams
met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed
and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction,
like skate-tracks on a popular ska ting-ground. Some
times streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from
the holes to some distance without dividing — and
through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran
down small, steep hills and were genuine cataracts of
fire, white at their source, but soon cooling and turning
to the richest red, grained with alternate lines of black
and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark
crust broke away and floated slowly down these
streams like rafts down a river.

THREE MONSTERS OF HAWAII 243

"Occasionally, the molten lava flowing under the
superincumbent crust broke through — split a dazzling
streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet long, like
a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of
the cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edge
wise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up,
plunged downward, and were swallowed in the crim
son caldron. Then the wide expanse of the 'thaw'
maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly
cooled and became black and level again. During a
'thaw' every dismembered cake was marked by a
glittering white border which was superbly shaded
inward by aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming
yellow where they joined the white border, and from
thence toward their points tapered into glowing crim
son, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a
faint blush that held its own a moment and then
dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams pre
ferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic cir
cles, and then they looked something like the confusion
of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just
taken in sail and dropped anchor — provided one can
imagine those ropes on fire.

"Through the glasses, the little fountains scat
tered about looked very beautiful. They boiled, and
coughed, and spluttered, and discharged sprays of
stringy red fire — of about the consistency of mush, for
instance — from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along
with a shower of brilliant white sparks — a quaint and
unnatural mingling of gouts of blood and snowflakes."

244 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

One can descend the sides and approach surpris
ingly close to the flaming surface, the temperature of
which, by the way, is 1750 degrees Fahrenheit.

Such is "The House of Everlasting Fire" to-day.
But who can say what it will be a year or a decade
hence? A clogging or a shifting of the vents below
sea-level, and Kilauea's lake of fire may become again
explosive. Who will deny that Kilauea may not soar
even above Mauna Loa? Stranger things have hap
pened before this in the Islands of Surprise.

THE SEDIMENTARY NATIONAL PARKS

XII

ON SEDIMENTARY ROCK IN SCENERY

THE national parks which are wrought in sedimen
tary rocks are Glacier, Mesa Verde, Hot Springs,
Platt, Wind Cave, Sully's Hill, and Grand Canyon.
Zion National Monument is carved from sedimentary
rock; also several distinguished reservations in our
southwest which conserve natural bridges and petri
fied forests.

Sedimentary rocks have highly attractive scenic
quality. Lying in strata usually horizontal but often
inclined by earth movements, sometimes even stand
ing on end, they form marked and pleasing contrasts
with the heavy massing of the igneous rocks and the
graceful undulations and occasional sharp-pointed sum
mits of the lavas.

As distinguished from igneous rocks, which form
under pressure in the earth's hot interior, and from
lava, which results from volcanic eruption when fluid
igneous rocks are released from pressure, sedimentary
rocks are formed by the solidification of precipitations
in water, like limestone; or from material resulting
from rock disintegrations washed down by streams,
like sandstone and shale. The beds in which they lie
one above another exhibit a wide range of tint and

247

248 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

texture, often forming spectacles of surpassing beauty
and grandeur.

These strata tend to cleave vertically, sometimes
producing an appearance suggestive of masonry, fre
quently forming impressive cliffs; but often they lie
in unbroken beds of great area. When a number of
well-defined strata cleave vertically, and one end of
the series sags below the other, or lifts above it, the
process which geologists call faulting, the scenic effect
is varied and striking; sometimes, as in Glacier Na
tional Park, it is puzzling and amazing.

Many granitic and volcanic landscapes are varie
gated in places by accidental beds of sedimentary
rock; and conversely occasional sedimentary land
scapes are set off by intrusions of igneous rocks.

Besides variety of form, sedimentary rocks fur
nish a wide range of color derived from mineral dyes
dissolved out of rocks by erosion. The gorgeous tint
of the Vermilion Cliff in Utah and Arizona, the reds and
greens of the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park,
the glowing cliffs of the Canyon de CheJly, and the
variegated hues of the Painted Desert are examples
which have become celebrated.

Geologists distinguish many kinds of sedimentary
rocks. Scenically, we need consider only four: lime
stone, conglomerate, sandstone, and shale.

Limestone is calcium carbonate derived principally
from sea-water, sometimes from fresh water, either by
the action of microscopic organisms which absorb it for
their shells, or occasionally by direct precipitation from

ON SEDIMENTARY ROCK IN SCENERY 249

saturated solutions. The sediment from organisms,
which is the principal source of American scenic lime
stones, collects as ooze in shallow lakes or seas, and
slowly hardens when lifted above the water-level.
Limestone is a common and prominent scenic rock;
generally it is gray or blue and weathers pale yellow.
Moisture seeping in from above often reduces soluble
minerals which drain away, leaving caves which some
times have enormous size.

The other sedimentary rocks which figure promi
nently in landscape are products of land erosion which
rivers sweep into seas or lakes, where they are promptly
deposited. The coarse gravels which naturally fall
first become conglomerate when cemented by the ac
tion of chemicals in water. The finer sandy particles
become sandstone. The fine mud, which deposits last,
eventually hardens into shale.

Shale has many varieties, but is principally hard
ened clay; it tends to split into slate-like plates each
the thickness of its original deposit. It is usually dull
brown or slate color, but sometimes, as in Glacier Na
tional Park and the Grand Canyon, shows a variety of
more or less brilliant colors and, by weathering, a wide
variety of kindred tints.

Sandstone, which forms wherever moving water
or wind has collected sands, and pressure or chemical
action has cemented them, is usually buff, but some
times is brilliantly colored.

The processes of Nature have mixed the earth's
scenic elements in seemingly inextricable confusion,

25o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

and the task of the geologist has been colossal. For
tunately for us, the elements of scenery are few, and
their larger combinations broad and simple. Once
the mind has grasped the outline and the processes,
and the eye has learned to distinguish elements and
recognize forms, the world is recreated for us.

XIII
GLACIERED PEAKS AND PAINTED SHALES

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, NORTHWESTERN MONTANA.
AREA, 1,534 SQUARE MILES

TO say that Glacier National Park is the Canadian
Rockies done in Grand Canyon colors is to ex
press a small part of a complicated fact. Glacier is
so much less and more. It is less in its exhibit of ice
arid snow. Both are dying glacial regions, and Glacier
is hundreds of centuries nearer the end; no longer can
it display snowy ranges in August and long, sinuous
Alaska-like glaciers at any time. Nevertheless, it has
its glaciers, sixty or more of them perched upon high
rocky shelves, the beautiful shrunken reminders of
one-time monsters. Also it has the precipice-walled
cirques and painted, lake-studded valleys which these
monsters left for the enjoyment of to-day.

It is these cirques and valleys which constitute
Glacier's unique feature, which make it incomparable
of its kind. Glacier's innermost sanctuaries of grandeur
are comfortably accessible and intimately enjoyable
for more than two months each summer. The great
est places of the Canadian Rockies are never accessible
comfortably; alpinists may clamber over their icy
crevasses and scale their slippery heights in August,

251

252 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

but the usual traveller will view their noblest spec
tacles from hotel porches or valley trails.

This comparison is useful because both regions are
parts of the same geological and scenic development in
which Glacier may be said to be scenically, though by
no means geologically, completed and the Canadian
Rockies still in the making. A hundred thousand
years or more from now the Canadian Rockies may have
reached, except for coloring, the present scenic state of
Glacier.

Glacier National Park hangs down from the
Canadian boundary-line in northwestern Montana,
where it straddles the continental divide. Adjoining
it on the north is the Waterton Lakes Park, Canada.
The Blackfeet Indian Reservation borders it on the
east. Its southern boundary is Marias Pass, through
which the Great Northern Railway crosses the crest
of the Rocky Mountains. Its western boundary is
the North Fork of the Flathead River. The park
contains fifteen hundred and thirty-four square miles.

Communication between the east and west sides
within the park is only by trail across passes over the
continental divide.

There are parts of America quite as distinguished
as Glacier: Mount McKinley, for its enormous snowy
mass and stature; Yosemite, for the quality of its
valley's beauty; Mount Rainier, for its massive radi
ating glaciers; Crater Lake, for its color range in pearls
and blues; Grand Canyon, for its stupendous painted
gulf. But there is no part of America or the Americas,

GLACIERED PEAKS 253

or of the world, to match it of its kind. In respect to
the particular wondrous thing these glaciers of old
left behind them when they shrank to shelved trifles,
there is no other. At Glacier one sees what he never
saw elsewhere and never will see again — except at
Glacier. There are mountains everywhere, but no
others carved into shapes quite like these; cirques in
all lofty ranges, but not cirques just such as these;
and because of these unique bordering highlands there
are nowhere else lakes having the particular kind of
charm possessed by Glacier's lakes.

Visitors seldom comprehend Glacier; hence they
are mute, or praise in generalities or vague superla
tives. Those who have not seen other mountains
find the unexpected and are puzzled. Those who have
seen other mountains fail to understand the difference
in these. I have never heard comparison with any
region except the Canadian Rockies, and this seldom
very intelligent. "I miss the big glaciers and snowy
mountain- tops," says the traveller of one type. "You
can really see something here besides snow, and how
stunning it all is ! " says the traveller of another type.
"My God, man, where are your artists?" cried an
Englishman who had come to St. Mary Lake to spend
a night and was finishing his week. "They ought to
be here in regiments. Not that this is the greatest
thing in the world, but that there's nothing else in
the world like it." Yet this emotional traveller, who
had seen the Himalayas, Andes, and Canadian Rockies,
could not tell me clearly why it was different. Neither

254 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

could the others explain why they liked it better than
the Canadian Rockies, or why its beauty puzzled and
disturbed them. It is only he whom intelligent travel
has educated to analyze and distinguish who sees in
the fineness and the extraordinary distinction of
Glacier's mountain forms the completion of the more
heroic undevelopment north of the border.

The elements of Glacier's personality are so un
usual that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to
make phrase describe it. Comparison fails. Pho
tographs will help, but not very efficiently, because
they do not convey its size, color, and reality; or per
haps I should say its unreality, for there are places
like Two Medicine Lake in still pale mid-morning,
St. Mary Lake during one of its gold sunsets, and the
cirques of the South Fork of the Belly River under
all conditions which never can seem actual.

To picture Glacier as nearly as possible, imagine
two mountain ranges roughly parallel in the north,
where they pass the continental divide between them
across a magnificent high intervening valley, and, in
the south, merging into a wild and apparently plan
less massing of high peaks and ranges. Imagine these
mountains repeating everywhere huge pyramids, enor
mous stone gables, elongated cones, and many other
unusual shapes, including numerous saw-toothed edges
which rise many thousand feet upward from swelling

GLACIERED PEAKS 255

sides, and suggest nothing so much as overturned keel-
boats. Imagine ranges glacier-bitten alternately on
either side with cirques of three or four thousand feet
of precipitous depth. Imagine these cirques often so
nearly meeting that the intervening walls are knife-
like edges; miles of such walls carry the continental
divide, and occasionally these cirques meet and the
intervening wall crumbles and leaves a pass across the
divide. Imagine places where cirque walls have been
so bitten outside as well as in that they stand like
amphitheatres builded up from foundations instead of
gouged out of rock from above.

Imagine these mountains plentifully snow-spat
tered upon their northern slopes and bearing upon
their shoulders many small and beautiful glaciers
perched upon rock-shelves above and back of the
cirques left by the greater glaciers of which they are the
remainders. These glaciers are nearly always wider
than they are long; of these I have seen only three
with elongated lobes. One is the Blackfeet Glacier,
whose interesting west lobe is conveniently situated
for observation south of Gunsight Lake, and another,
romantically beautiful Agassiz Glacier, in the far
northwest of the park, whose ice-currents converge
in a tongue which drops steeply to its snout. These
elongations are complete miniatures, each exhibiting
in little more than half a mile of length all usual gla
cial phenomena, including caves and ice-falls. Occa
sionally, as on the side of Mount Jackson at Gunsight
Pass and east of it, one notices small elongated gla-

256 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

tiers occupying clefts in steep slopes. The largest and
most striking of these tongued glaciers is the western
most of the three Carter Glaciers on the slopes of
Mount Carter. It cascades its entire length into Bow
man Valley, and Marius R. Campbell's suggestion that
it should be renamed the Cascading Glacier deserves
consideration.

Imagine deep rounded valleys emerging from these
cirques and twisting snakelike among enormous and
sometimes grotesque rock masses which often are in
conceivably twisted and tumbled, those of each drain
age-basin converging fanlike to its central valley.
Sometimes a score or more of cirques, great and small,
unite their valley streams for the making of a river;
seven principal valleys, each the product of such a
group, emerge from the east side of the park, thirteen
from the west.

Imagine hundreds of lakes whose waters, fresh-
run from snow-field and glacier, brilliantly reflect the
odd surrounding landscape. Each glacier has its lake
or lakes of robin's-egg blue. Every successive shelf
of every glacial stairway has its lake — one or more.
And every valley has its greater lake or string of lakes.
Glacier is pre-eminently the park of lakes. When all
is said and done, they constitute its most distinguished
single element of supreme beauty. For several of
them enthusiastic admirers loudly claim world pre
eminence.

And finally imagine this picture done in soft
glowing colors — not only the blue sky, the flowery

GLACIERED PEAKS 257

meadows, the pine-green valleys, and the innumerable
many-hued waters, but the rocks, the mountains, and
the cirques besides. The glaciers of old penetrated the
most colorful depths of earth's skin, the very ancient
Algonkian strata, that from which a part of the Grand
Canyon also was carved. At this point, the rocks ap
pear in four differently colored layers. The lowest of
these is called the Altyn limestone. There are about
sixteen hundred feet of it, pale blue within, weather
ing pale buff. Whole yellow mountains of this rock
hang upon the eastern edge of the park. Next above
the Altyn lies thirty-four hundred feet of Appekunny
argillite, or dull-green shale. The tint is pale, deep
ening to that familiar in the lower part of the Grand
Canyon. It weathers every darkening shade to very
dark greenish-brown. Next above that lies twenty-
two hundred feet of Grinnell argillite, or red shale, a
dull rock of varying pinks which weathers many shades
of red and purple, deepening in places almost to black.
There is some gleaming white quartzite mixed with
both these shales. Next above lies more than four
thousand feet of Siyeh limestone, very solid, very
massive, iron-gray with an insistent flavor of yellow,
and weathering buff. This heavy stratum is the most
impressive part of the Glacier landscape. Horizon
tally through its middle runs a dark broad ribbon of
diorite, a rock as hard as granite, which once, while
molten, burst from below and forced its way between
horizontal beds of limestone; and occasionally, as in
the Swiftcurrent and Triple Divide Passes, there are

258 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

dull iron-black lavas in heavy twisted masses. Above
all of these colored strata once lay still another shale
of very brilliant red. Fragments of this, which ge
ologists call the Kintla formation, may be seen top
ping mountains here and there in the northern part of
the park.

Imagine these rich strata hung east and west
across the landscape and sagging deeply in the middle,
so that a horizontal line would cut all colors diagonally.

Now imagine a softness of line as well as color
resulting probably from the softness of the rock; there
is none of the hard insistence, the uncompromising
defmiteness of the granite landscape. And imagine
further an impression of antiquity, a feeling akin to
that with which one enters a mediaeval ruin or sees
the pyramids of Egypt. Only here is the look of im
mense, unmeasured, immeasurable age. More than
at any place except perhaps the rim of the Grand
Canyon does one seem to stand in the presence of the
infinite; an instinct which, while it baffles analysis, is
sound, for there are few rocks of the earth's skin so
aged as these ornate shales and limestones.

And now, at last, you can imagine Glacier !

Ill

But, with Glacier, this is not enough. To see, to
realize in full its beauty, still leaves one puzzled. One
of the peculiarities of the landscape, due perhaps to its
differences, is its insistence upon explanation. How

GLACIERED PEAKS 259

came this prehistoric plain so etched with cirques and
valleys as to leave standing only worm-like crests,
knife-edged walls, amphitheatres, and isolated peaks?
The answer is the story of a romantic episode in the
absorbing history of America's making.

Somewhere between forty and six hundred million
years ago, according to the degree of conservatism con
trolling the geologist who does the calculating, these
lofty mountains were deposited in the shape of muddy
sediments on the bottom of shallow fresh-water lakes,
whose waves left many ripple marks upon the soft
muds of its shores, fragments of which, hardened now
to shale, are frequently found by tourists. So ancient
was the period that these deposits lay next above the
primal Archean rocks, and marked, therefore, almost
the beginning of accepted geological history. Life was
then so nearly at its beginnings that the forms which
Walcott found in the Siyeh limestone were not at first
fully accepted as organic.

Thereafter, during a tune so long that none may
even estimate it, certainly for many millions of years,
the history of the region leaves traces of no extraor
dinary change. It sank possibly thousands of feet be
neath the fresh waters tributary to the sea which once
swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, and
accumulated there sediments which to-day are scenic
limestones and shales, and doubtless other sediments
above these which have wholly passed away. It
may have alternated above and below water-level
many times, as our southwest has done. Even-

26o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

tually, under earth-pressures concerning whose cause
many theories have lived and died, it rose to remain
until our times.

Then, millions of years ago, but still recently as
compared with the whole vast lapse we are consider
ing, came the changes which seem dramatic to us as
we look back upon them accomplished; but which
came to pass so slowly that no man, had man then
lived, could have noticed a single step of progress in
the course of a long life. Under earth-pressures the
skin buckled and the Rocky Mountains rose. At
some stage of this process the range cracked along its
crest from what is now Marias Pass to a point just
over the Canadian border, and, a couple of hundred
miles farther north, from the neighborhood of Banff
to the northern end of the Canadian Rockies.

Then the great overthrust followed. Side-pres
sures of inconceivable power forced upward the west
ern edge of this crack, including the entire crust from
the Algonkian strata up, and thrust it over the eastern
edge. During the over thrusting, which may have
taken a million years, and during the millions of years
since, the frosts have chiselled open and the rains have
washed away all the overthrust strata, the accumula
tions of the geological ages from Algonkian times down,
except only that one bottom layer. This alone re
mained for the three ice invasions of the Glacial Age
to carve into the extraordinary area which is called
to-day the Glacier National Park.

The Lewis Overthrust, so called because it hap-

GLACIERED PEAKS 261

pened to the Lewis Range, is ten to fifteen miles wide.
The eastern boundary of the park roughly defines its
limit of progress. Its signs are plain to the eye taught
to perceive them. The yellow mountains on the east
ern edge near the gateway to Lake McDermott lie
on top of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, whose
surface is many millions of years younger and quite
different in coloring. Similarly, Chief Mountain, at
the entrance of the Belly River Valley, owes much of
its remarkable distinction to the incompatibility of its
form and color with the prairie upon which it lies
but out of which it seems to burst. The bottom of
McDermott Falls at Many Glacier Hotel is plainly a
younger rock than the colored Algonkian limestones
which form its brink.

Perhaps thousands of years after the overthrust
was accomplished another tremendous faulting still
further modified the landscape of to-day. The over-
thrust edge cracked lengthwise, this time west of the
continental divide all the way from the Canadian line
southward nearly to Marias Pass. The edge of the
strata west of this crack sank perhaps many thousands
of feet, leaving great precipices on the west side of the
divide similar to those on the east side. There was
this great difference, however, in what followed: the
elongated gulf or ditch thus formed became filled with
the deposits of later geologic periods.

This whole process, which also was very slow in
movement, is important in explaining the conforma
tion and scenic peculiarities of the west side of the

* THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

park, which, as the tourist sees it to-day, is remarkably
different from those of the east side. Here, the great
limestone ranges, glaciered, cirqued, and precipiced as
on the east side, suddenly give place to broad, un
dulating plains which constitute practically the whole
of the great west side from the base of the mountains
on the east to the valley of the Flathead which forms
the park's western boundary. These plains are grown
thickly with splendid forests. Cross ranges, largely
glacier-built, stretch west from the high mountains,
subsiding rapidly; and between these ranges lie long
winding lakes, forest-grown to their edges, which carry
the western drainage of the continental divide through
outlet streams into the Flathead.

The inconceivable lapse of time covered in these
titanic operations of Nature and their excessive slow
ness of progress rob them of much of their dramatic
quality. Perhaps an inch of distance was an extraor
dinary advance for the Lewis Overthrust to make in
any ordinary year, and doubtless there were lapses of
centuries when no measurable advance was made.
Yet sometimes sudden settlings, accompanied by more
or less extended earthquakes, must have visibly altered
local landscapes.

Were it possible, by some such mental fore
shortening as that by which the wizards of the screen
compress a life into a minute, for imagination to
hasten this progress into the compass of a few hours,
how overwhelming would be the spectacle ! How
tremendously would loom this advancing edge, which

GLACIERED PEAKS 263

at first we may conceive as having enormous thickness !
How it must have cracked, crumbled, and fallen in
frequent titanic crashes as it moved forward. It does
not need the imagination of Dore to picture this ad
vance, thus hastened in fancy, grim, relentless as death,
its enormous towering head lost in eternal snows, its
feet shaken by earthquakes, accumulating giant gla
ciers only to crush them into powder; resting, then
pushing forward in slow, smashing, reverberating
shoves. How the accumulations of all periods may
be imagined crashing together into the depths! Si
lurian gastropods, strange Devonian fishes, enormous
Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells of the
Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cre
taceous, the little early horses of Eocene, and Mi
ocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil
remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the eternal
ages!

It all happened, but unfortunately for a romantic
conception, it did not happen with dramatic speed.
Hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of years in
tervened between the greater stages of progress which,
with intervening lesser stages, merged into a seldom-
broken quietude such as that which impresses to-day's
visitor to the mountain-tops of Glacier National Park.
And who can say that the landscape which to-day's
visitor, with the inborn arrogance of man, looks upon
as the thing which the ages have completed for his
pleasure, may not merely represent a minor stage in a
progress still more terrible?

264 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The grist of Creation's past milling has disap
peared. The waters of heaven, collected and stored
in snow-fields and glaciers to be released in seasonal
torrents, have washed it all away. Not a sign remains
to-day save here and there perhaps a fragment of
Cretaceous coal. All has been ground to powder and
carried off by flood and stream to enrich the soils and
upbuild later strata in the drainage basins of the
Saskatchewan, the Columbia, and the Mississippi.

It is probable that little remained but the Algon-
kian shales and limestones when the Ice Age sent
southward the first of its three great invasions. Doubt
less already there were glaciers there of sorts, but the
lowering temperatures which accompanied the ice-
sheets developed local glaciers so great of size that only
a few mountain- tops were left exposed. It was then
that these extraordinary cirques were carved. There
were three such periods during the Ice Age, between
which and after which stream erosion resumed its un
tiring sway. The story of the ice is written high upon
Glacier's walls and far out on the eastern plains.

Into this wonderland the visitor enters by one of
two roads. Either he leaves the railroad at Glacier
Park on the east side of the continental divide or at
Bel ton on the west side. In either event he can cross
to the other side only afoot or on horseback over
passes. The usual way in is through Glacier Park.

GLACIERED PEAKS 265

There is a large hotel at the station from which auto
mobile-stages run northward to chalets at Two Medicine
Lake, the Cut Bank Valley, and St. Mary Lake, and
to the Many Glacier Hotel and chalets at Lake McDer-
mott. A road also reaches Lake McDermott from
Canada by way of Babb, and Canadian visitors can
reach the trails at the head of Waterton Lake by boat
from their own Waterton Lakes Park. Those entering
at Bel ton, where the park headquarters are located,
find chalets at the railroad-station and an excellent
hotel near the head of Lake McDonald. There is also
a comfortable chalet close to the Sperry Glacier.

To see Glacier as thoroughly as Glacier deserves
and to draw freely on its abundant resources of plea
sure and inspiration, one must travel the trails and pitch
his tent where day's end brings him. But that does
not mean that Glacier cannot be seen and enjoyed by
those to whom comfortable hotel accommodations are
a necessity, or even by those who find trail-travelling
imDossible.

Visitors, therefore, fall into three general classes,
all of whom may study scenery which quite fully cov
ers the range of Glacier's natural phenomena and pe
culiar beauty. The largest of these classes consists
of those who can travel, or think they can travel, only
in vehicles, and can find satisfactory accommodations
only in good hotels. The intermediate class includes
those who can, at a pinch, ride ten or twelve miles on
comfortably saddled horses which walk the trails at
two or three miles an hour, and who do not object to

266 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

the somewhat primitive but thoroughly comfortable
overnight accommodations of the chalets. Finally
comes the small class, which constantly will increase,
of those who have the time and inclination to leave
the beaten path with tent and camping outfit for the
splendid wilderness and the places of supreme mag
nificence which are only for those who seek.

The man, then, whose tendency to gout, let us say,
forbids him ride a horse or walk more than a couple
of easy miles a day may, nevertheless, miss nothing of
Glacier's meaning and magnificence provided he takes
the trouble to understand. But he must take the
trouble; he must comprehend the few examples that
he sees; this is his penalty for refusing the rich experi
ence of the trail, which, out of its very fulness, drives
meaning home with little mental effort. His knowl
edge must be got from six places only which may be
reached by vehicle, at least three of which, however,
may be included among the world's great scenic
places. He can find at Two Medicine, St. Mary, and
McDermott superb examples of Glacier's principal
scenic elements.

Entering at Glacier Park, he will have seen the
range from the plains, an important beginning; al
ready, approaching from the east, he has watched it
grow wonderfully on the horizon. So suddenly do
these painted mountains spring from the grassy plain
that it is a relief to recognize in them the advance
guard of the Lewis Over thrust, vast fragments of the
upheavals of the depths pushed eastward by the cen-

GLACIERED PEAKS 267

turies to their final resting-places upon the surface of
the prairie. From the hotel porches they glow gray
and yellow and purple and rose and pink, according to
the natural coloring of their parts and the will of the
sun — a splendid ever-changing spectacle.

THE Two MEDICINE COUNTRY

An hour's automobile-ride from Glacier Park
Hotel will enable our traveller to penetrate the range
at a point of supreme beauty and stand beside a chalet
at the foot of Two Medicine Lake. He will face what
appears to be a circular lake in a densely forested val
ley from whose shore rises a view of mountains which

will take his breath. In the near centre stands a cone
i

of enormous size and magnificence — Mount Rockwell
— faintly blue, mistily golden, richly purple, dull silver,
or red and gray, according to the favor of the hour and
the sky. Upon its left and somewhat back rises a
smaller similar cone, flatter but quite as perfectly
proportioned, known as Grizzly Mountain, and upon
its right less regular masses. In the background, con
necting all, are more distant mountains flecked with
snow, the continental divide. Towering mountains
close upon him upon both sides, that upon his right a
celebrity in red argillite known as Rising Wolf. He
sees all this from a beach of many-colored pebbles.

Few casual visitors have more than a midday
view of Two Medicine Lake, for the stage returns in
the afternoon. The glory of the sunset and the won
der before sunrise are for the few who stay over at the

268 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

chalet. The lover of the exquisite cannot do better,
for, though beyond lie scenes surpassing this in the
qualities which bring to the lips the shout of joy, I
am convinced that nothing elsewhere equals the Two
Medicine canvas in the perfection of delicacy. It is
the Meissonier of Glacier.

Nor can the student of Nature's processes afford
to miss the study of Two Medicine's marvellously
complete and balanced system of cirques and valleys
— though this of course is not for the rheumatic trav
eller but for him who fears not horse and tent. Such
an explorer will find thrills with every passing hour.
Giant Mount Rockwell wilt produce one when a side-
view shows that its apparent cone is merely the smaller
eastern end of a ridge two miles long which culmi
nates in a towering summit on the divide; Pumpelly
Filler, with the proportions of a monument when seen
from near the lake, becomes, seen sideways, another
long and exceedingly beautiful ridge; striking exam
ples, these, of the leavings of converging glaciers of
old. Two Medicine Lake proves to be long and narrow,
the chalet view being the long way, and Upper Two
Medicine Lake proves to be an emerald-encircled pearl
in a silvery-gray setting. The climax of such a sev
eral days' trip is a night among the coyotes at the head
of the main valley and a morning upon Dawson Pass
overlooking the indescribable tangle of peak, precipice,
and canyon lying west of the continental divide.

Taken as a whole, the Two Medicine drainage-
basin is an epitome of Glacier in miniature. To those

GLACIERED PEAKS 269

entering the park on the east side and seeing it first
it becomes an admirable introduction to the greater
park. To those who have entered on the west side
and finish here it is an admirable farewell review,
especially as its final picture sounds the note of scenic
perfection. Were there nothing else of Glacier, this
spot would become in tune itself a world celebrity.
Incidentally, exceedingly lively Eastern brook-trout
will afford an interesting hour to one who floats a fly
down the short stream into the lakelet at the foot of
Two Medicine Lake not far below the chalet. There
are also fish below Trick Falls.

THE SPECTACLE OF ST. MARY

St. Mary Lake, similarly situated in the outlet
valley of a much greater group of cirques north of
Two Medicine, offers a picture as similar in kind as
two canvases are similar which have been painted by
the same hand; but they widely differ in composition
and magnificence; Two Medicine's preciousness yields
to St. Mary's elemental grandeur. The steamer which
brings our rheumatic traveller from the motor-stage
at the foot of the lake lands him at the upper chalet
group, appropriately Swiss, which finds vantage on a
rocky promontory for the view of the divide. Gigan
tic moun tains of deep-red argillite, grotesquely carved,
close in the sides, and with lake and sky wonderfully
frame the amazing central picture of pointed pyra
mids, snow-fields, hanging glaciers, and silvery ridges
merging into sky. Seen on the way into Glacier,

270 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

St. Mary is a prophecy which will not be fulfilled else
where in charm though often far exceeded in degree.
Seen leaving Glacier, it combines with surpassing
novelty scenic elements whose possibilities of further
gorgeous combination the trip through the park has
seemed to exhaust.

The St. Mary picture is impossible to describe.
Its colors vary with the hours and the atmosphere's
changing conditions. It is silver, golden, mauve, blue,
lemon, misty white, and red by turn. It is seen clearly
in the morning with the sun behind you. Afternoons
and sunsets offer theatrical effects, often baffling,
always lovely and different. Pointed Fusillade and
peaked Reynolds Mountains often lose their tops in
lowering mists. So, often, does Going-to-the-Sun
Mountain in the near-by right foreground. So, not
so often, does keel-shaped Citadel Mountain on the
near-by left; also, at times, majestic Little Chief, he
of lofty mien and snow-dashed crown, and stolid Red
Eagle, whose gigantic reflection reddens a mile of
waters. It is these close-up monsters even more than
the colorful ghosts of the Western horizon which stamp
St. Mary's personality.

From the porches of the chalets and the deck of
the steamer in its evening tour of the lake-end the
traveller will note the enormous size of those upper
valleys which once combined their glaciers as now they
do their streams. He will guess that the glacier which
once swept through the deep gorge in whose bottom
now lies St. Mary Lake was several thousand feet in

GLACIERED PEAKS 271

thickness. He will long to examine those upper valleys
and reproduce in imagination the amazing spectacle of
long ago. But they are not for him. That vision is
reserved for those who ride the trails.

THE SCENIC CLIMAX OF THE SWIFTCURRENT

Again passing north, the automobile-stage reaches
road's end at McDermott Lake, the fan-handle of the
Swiftcurrent drainage-basin. Overlooking a magnifi-*
cent part of each of its contributing valleys, the lake,
itself supremely beautiful, may well deserve its repu
tation as Glacier's scenic centre. I have much sym
pathy with the thousands who claim supremacy for
McDermott Lake. Lake McDonald has its wonder
fully wooded shores, its majestic length and august
vista; Helen Lake its unequalled wildness; Bowman
Lake its incomparable view of glacier-shrouded divide.
But McDermott has something of everything; it is
a composite, a mosaic masterpiece with every stone a
gem. There is no background from which one looks
forward to "the view." Its horizon contains three
hundred and sixty degrees of view. From the towering
south gable of that rock-temple to God the Creator,
which the map calls Mount Gould, around the circle,
it offers an unbroken panorama in superlative.

In no sense by way of comparison, which is ab
surd between scenes so different, but merely to help
realization by contrast with what is well known, let
us recall the Yosemite Valley. Yosemite is a valley,
Swiftcurrent an enclosure. Yosemite is gray and

272 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

shining, Swiftcurrent richer far in color. Yosemite's
walls are rounded, peaked, and polished, Swiftcurrent's
toothed, torn, and crumbling; the setting sun shines
through holes worn by frost and water in the living rock.
Yosemite guards her western entrance with a shaft of
gray granite rising thirty-six hundred feet from the
valley floor, and her eastern end by granite domes of
five thousand and six thousand feet; Swiftcurrent's
rocks gather round her central lake — Altyn, thirty-two
hundred feet above the lake's level; Henkel, thirty-
eight hundred feet; Wilbur, forty-five hundred feet;
Grinnell, four thousand; Gould, forty-seven hundred;
Allen, forty-five hundred — all of colored strata, green
at base, then red, then gray. Yosemite has its wind
ing river and waterfalls, Swiftcurrent its lakes and
glaciers.

Swiftcurrent has the repose but not the softness of
Yosemite. Yosemite is unbelievably beautiful. Swift-
current inspires wondering awe.

McDermott Lake, focus point of all this natural
glory, is scarcely a mile long, and narrow. It may be
vivid blue and steel-blue and milky-blue, and half a
dozen shades of green and pink all within twice as
many minutes, according to the whim of the breeze,
the changing atmosphere, and the clouding of the sun.
Often it suggests nothing so much as a pool of dull-
green paint. Or it may present a reversed image of
mountains, glaciers, and sky in their own coloring.
Or at sunset it may turn lemon or purple or crimson
or orange, or a blending of all. Or, with rushing storm-

GLACIERED PEAKS 273

clouds, it may quite suddenly lose every hint of any
color, and become a study in black, white, and inter
mediate grays.

There are times when, from hotel porch, rock, or
boat, the towering peaks and connecting limestone
walls become suddenly so fairylike that they lose all
sense of reality, seeming to merge into their background
of sky, from which, nevertheless, they remain sharply
differentiated. The rapidity and the variety of change
in the appearance of the water is nothing to that in
the appearance of these magical walls and mountains.
Now near, now distant; now luring, now forbidding;
now gleaming as if with their own light; now gloomy
in threat, they lose not their hold on the eye for a
moment. The unreality of McDermott Lake, the sense
it often imparts of impossibility, is perhaps its most
striking feature. One suspects he dreams, awake.

THE SCENIC CIRCLE

To realize the spot as best we may, let us pause
on the bridge among those casting for trout below the
upper fall and glance around. To our left rises Allen
Mountain, rugged, irregular, forest-clothed half-way
up its forty-five hundred feet of elevation above the
valley floor. Beyond it a long gigantic wall sets in
at right angles, blue, shining, serrated, supporting,
apparently on the lake edge, an enormous gable end of
gray limestone banded with black diorite, a veritable
personality comparable with Yosemite's most famous
rocks. This is Mount Gould. Next is the Grinnell

274 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Glacier, hanging glistening in the air, dripping water
falls, backgrounded by the gnawed top of the venerable
Garden Wall. Then comes in turn the majestic mass
of Mount Grinnell, four miles long, culminating at the
lakeside in an enormous parti-colored pyramid more
impressive from the hotel than even Rockwell is from
Two Medicine chalets. Then, upon its right, appears
a wall which is the unnamed continuation of the
Garden Wall, and, plastered against the side of Swift-
current Mountain, three small hanging glaciers, seem
ing in the distance like two long parallel snow-banks.
Then Mount Wilbur, another giant pyramid, gray,
towering, massively carved, grandly proportioned,
kingly in bearing ! Again upon its right emerges still
another continuation, also unnamed, of the Garden
Wall, this section loftiest of all and bitten deeply by
the ages. A part of it is instantly recognized from the
hotel window as part of the sky-line surrounding famous
Iceberg Lake. Its right is lost behind the nearer slopes
of red Mount Henkel, which swings back upon our right,
bringing the eye nearly to its starting-point. A glance
out behind between mountains, upon the limitless
lake-dotted plain, completes the scenic circle.

McDermott Lake, by which I here mean the Swift-
current enclosure as seen from the Many Glacier
Hotel, is illustrative of all of Glacier. There are wilder
spots, by far, some which frighten; there are places of
nobler beauty, though as I write I know I shall deny
it the next time I stand on McDermott's shores; there
are supreme places which at first glance seem to have

GLACIERED PEAKS 275

no kinship with any other place on earth. Neverthe
less, McDermott contains all of Glacier's elements, all
her charm, and practically all her combinations. It
is the place of places to study Glacier. It is also a
place to dream away idle weeks.

So he who cannot ride or walk the trails may still
see and understand Glacier in her majesty. Besides
the places I have mentioned he may see, from the Cut
Bank Chalet, a characteristic forested valley of great
beauty, and at Lewis's hotel on Lake McDonald the
finest spot accessible upon the broad west side, the
playground, as the east side is the show-place, of hun
dreds of future thousands.

So many are the short horseback trips from
Many Glacier Hotel to places of significance and beauty
that it is hard for the timid to withstand the tempta
tion of the trail. Four miles will reach Grinnell Lake
at the foot of its glacier, six miles will penetrate the
Cracker Lake Gorge at the perpendicular base of
Mount Siyeh, eight miles will disclose the astonishing
spectacle of Iceberg Lake, and nine miles will cross the
Swiftcurrent Pass to the Granite Park Chalet.

ICEBERG LAKE TYPICAL OF ALL

In some respects Iceberg Lake is Glacier's supreme
spectacle. There are few spots so wild. There may
be no easily accessible spot in the world half so wild.
Imagine a horseshoe of perpendicular rock wall, twenty-
seven hundred to thirty-five hundred feet high, a gla
cier in its inmost curve, a lake of icebergs in its centre.

276 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The back of the tower-peak of Mount Wilbur is the
southern end of this horseshoe. This enclosure was
not built up from below, as it looks, but bitten down
within and without; it was left. On the edge of the
lake in early July the sun sets at four o'clock.

Stupendous as Iceberg Lake is as a spectacle, its
highest purpose is illustrative. It explains Glacier.
Here by this lakeside, fronting the glacier's floating
edge and staring up at the jagged top in front and on
either side, one comprehends at last. The appalling
story of the past seems real.

THE CLIMAX AT GRANITE PARK

It is at Granite Park that one realizes the geog
raphy of Glacier. You have crossed the continental
divide and emerged upon a lofty abutment just west of
it. You are very nearly in the park's centre, and on
the margin of a forested canyon of impressive breadth
and depth, lined on either side by mountain monsters,
and reaching from Mount Cannon at the head of Lake
McDonald northward to the Alberta plain. The
western wall of this vast avenue is the Livingston
Range. Its eastern wall is the Lewis Range. Both
in turn carry the continental divide, which crosses the
avenue from Livingston to Lewis by way of low-
crowned Flattop Mountain, a few miles north of where
you stand, and back to Livingston by way of Clements
Mountain, a few miles south. Opposite you, across
the chasm, rises snowy Heavens Peak. Southwest
lies Lake McDonald, hidden by Heavens' shoulder.

From a photograph by Haynes

T ) -) ' B ' '"! "• •> ) '

PTARMIGAN LAKE AND MOUNT WILBUR, GLACIER NATIONAL PARK '

From a photograph by A . J. Thin

SCOOPED BOTH SIDES BY GIANT GLACIERS
Wall on the left encloses Iceberg Lake; on the right is the Belly River abyss; Glacier National Park

GLACIERED PEAKS 277

South is Logan Pass, carrying another trail across the
divide, and disclosing hanging gardens beyond on
Reynolds' eastern slope. Still south of that, unseen
from here, is famous Gunsight Pass.

It is a stirring spectacle. But wait. A half-
hour's climb to the summit of Swiftcurrent Mountain
close at hand (the chalet is most of the way up, to start
with) and all of Glacier lies before you like a model in
relief. Here you see the Iceberg Cirque from without
and above. The Belly River chasm yawns enormously.
Mount Cleveland, monarch of the region, flaunts his
crown of snow among his near-by court of only lesser
monsters. The Avenue of the Giants deeply splits the
northern half of the park, that land of extravagant
accent, mysterious because so little known; the Gla
cier of tourists lying south. A marvellous spectacle,
this, indeed, and one which clears up many misconcep
tions. The Canadian Rockies hang on the misty
northern horizon, the Montana plains float eastward,
the American Rockies roll south and west.

OVER GUNSIGHT PASS

To me one of the most stirring sights in all Glacier
is the view of Gunsight Pass from the foot of Gunsight
Lake. The immense glaciered uplift of Mount Jack
son on the south of the pass, the wild whitened sides
of Gunsight Mountain opposite dropping to the up
turned strata of red shale at the water's edge, the pass
itself — so well named — perched above the dark preci
pice at the lake's head, the corkscrew which the trail

278 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

makes up Jackson's perpendicular flank and its pas
sage across a mammoth snow-bank high in air — these
in contrast with the silent black water of the sunken
lake produce ever the same thrill however often seen.
The look back, too, once the pass is gained, down St.
Mary's gracious valley to Going-to-the-Sun Mountain
and its horizon companions! Sun Mountain (for
short), always a personality, is never from any other
point of view so undeniably the crowned majesty as
from Gunsight Pass. And finally, looking forward,
which in this speaking means westward, the first
revelation of Lake Ellen Wilson gives a shock of awed
astonishment whose memory can never pass.

Truly, Gunsight is a pass of many sensations, for,
leaving Lake Ellen Wilson and its eighteen hundred
feet of vertical frothing outlet, the westward trail
crosses the shoulder of Lincoln Peak to the Sperry
Glacier and its inviting chalet (where the biggest hoary
marmot I ever saw sat upon my dormitory porch),
and, eight miles farther down the mountain, beautiful
Lake McDonald.

DESTINY OF THE WEST SIDE

Although it was settled earlier, Glacier's west side
is less developed than its east side; this because, -for
the most part, its scenery is less sensational though no
less gorgeously beautiful. Its five long lakes, of which
McDonald is much the longest and largest, head up
toward the snowy monsters of the divide; their thin
bodies wind leisurely westward among superbly for-

GLACIERED PEAKS 279

ested slopes. Its day is still to come. It is the land
of the bear, the moose, the deer, the trout, and summer
leisure. Its destiny is to become Glacier's vacation
playground.

THE COMING SPLENDORS OF THE NORTH

The wild north side of Glacier, its larger, bigger-
featured, and occasionally greater part, is not yet for
the usual tourist; for many years from this writing,
doubtless, none will know it but the traveller with tent
and pack-train. He alone, and may his tribe increase,
will enjoy the gorgeous cirques and canyons of the
Belly River, the wild quietude of the Waterton Valley,
the regal splendors of Brown Pass, and the headwater
spectacles of the Logging, Quartz, Bowman, and Kintla
valleys. He alone will realize that here is a land of
greater power, larger measures, and bigger horizons.

And yet with Kintla comes climax. Crossing the
border the mountains subside, the glaciers disappear.
Canada's Waterton Lakes Park begins at our climax
and merges in half a dozen miles into the great prairies
of Alberta. It is many miles northwest before the
Canadian Rockies assume proportions of superlative
scenic grandeur.

THE BELLY RIVER VALLEYS

To realize the growing bigness of the land north
ward one has only to cross the wall from Iceberg Lake
into the Belly River canyon. "Only," indeed! In
1917 it took us forty miles of detour outside the park,

28o THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

even under the shadow of Chief Mountain, to cross the
wall from Iceberg Lake, the west-side precipice of which
is steeper even than the east. The Belly River drain
age-basin is itself bigger, and its mountains bulk in
proportion. Eighteen glaciers contribute to the making
of perhaps as many lakes. The yellow mountains of
its northern slopes invade Canada. The borders of its
principal valley are two monster mountains, Cleve
land, the greatest in the park for mass and height and
intricate outline; the other, Merritt, in some respects
the most interesting of Glacier's abundant collection
of majestic peaks.

There are three valleys. The North Fork finds
its way quickly into Canada. The Middle Fork rises
in a group of glaciers high under the continental divide
and descends four giant steps, a lake upon each step,
to two greater lakes of noble aspect in the valley
bottom. The South Fork emerges from Helen Lake
deep in the gulf below the Ahern Glacier across the
Garden Wall from Iceberg Lake. Between the Mid
dle and South Forks Mount Merritt rises 9,944 feet
in altitude, minareted like a mediaeval fort and hollow
as a bowl, its gaping chasm hung with glaciers.

This is the valley of abundance. The waters are
large, their trout many and vigorous; the bottoms are
extravagantly rich in grasses and flowers; the forests
are heavy and full-bodied; there is no open place, even
miles beyond its boundaries, which does not offer views
of extraordinary nobility. Every man who enters it
becomes enthusiastically prophetic of its future. After

GLACIERED PEAKS 281

all, the Belly River country is easily visited. A
leisurely horseback journey from McDermott, that is
all; three days among the strange yellow mountains
of the overthrust's eastern edge, including two after
noons among the fighting trout of Kennedy Creek and
Slide Lake, and two nights in camp among the wild bare
arroyos of the Algonkian invasion of the prairie — an
interesting prelude to the fulness of wilderness life to
come.

I dwell upon the Belly valleys because their size,
magnificence, and accessibility suggest a future of
public use; nothing would be easier, for instance, than
a road from Babb to join the road already in from
Canada. The name naturally arouses curiosity. Why
Belly? Was it not the Anglo-Saxon frontier's pro
nunciation of the Frenchman's original Belle? The
river, remember, is mainly Canadian. Surely in all
its forks and tributaries it was and is the Beautiful
River.

THE AVENUE OF THE GIANTS

The Avenue of the Giants looms in any forecast
of Glacier's future. It really consists of two valleys
joined end on at their beginnings on Flattop Mountain;
McDonald Creek flowing south, Little Kootenai flow
ing north. The road which will replace the present
trail up this avenue from the much-travelled south to
Waterton Lake and Canada is a matter doubtless of
a distant future, but it is so manifestly destiny that it
must be accepted as the key to the greater Glacier to

282 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

come. Uniting at its southern end roads from both
sides of the divide, it will reach the Belly valleys by
way of Ahern Pass, the Bowman and Kintla valleys
by way of Brown Pass, and will terminate at the im
portant tourist settlement which is destined to grow
at the splendid American end of Waterton Lake. In
cidentally it will become an important motor-highway
between Canada and America. Until then, though all
these are now accessible by trail, the high distinction
of the Bowman and the Kintla valleys' supreme ex
pression of the glowing genius of this whole country will
remain unknown to any considerable body of travellers.

THE CLIMAX OF BOWMAN AND KINTLA

And, after all, the Bowman and Kintla regions are
Glacier's ultimate expression, Bowman of her beauty,
Kintla of her majesty. No one who has seen the foam
ing cascades of Mount Peabody and a lost outlet of
the lofty Boulder Glacier emerging dramatically
through Hole-in-the-Wall Fall, for all the world like
a horsetail fastened upon the face of a cliff, who has
looked upon the Guardhouse from Brown Pass and
traced the distant windings of Bowman Lake between
the fluted precipice of Rainbow Peak and the fading
slopes of Indian Ridge; or has looked upon the mighty
monolith of Kintla Peak rising five thousand feet
from the lake in its gulf -like valley, spreading upon its
shoulders, like wings prepared for flight, the broad
gleaming glaciers known as Kintla and Agassiz, will
withhold his guerdon for a moment.

SHOWING THE AGAZZIZ GLACIER

Kintla Peak, Glacier National Park, 5,000 feet above the las:e, '.spreads gjaniers out 'e'iih^r

way like wings > \j '

From a photograph by M. R. Campbell

BEAUTIFUL BOWMAN LAKE, GLACIER NATIONAL PARK

It heads close up under the Continental Divide, where is found some of the most striking
scenery of America

GLACIERED PEAKS 283

Here again we repeat, for the hundredth or more
time in our leisurely survey of the park, what the Eng
lishman said of the spectacle of St. Mary: " There is
nothing like it in the world."

XIV

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, SOUTHWESTERN COLORADO.
AREA, 77 SQUARE MILES

MANY years, possibly centuries, before Columbus
discovered America, a community of cliff-dwell
ers inhabiting a group of canyons in what is now
southwestern Colorado entirely disappeared.

Many generations before that, again possibly
centuries, the founders of this community, abandoning
the primitive pueblos of their people elsewhere, had
sought new homes in the valleys tributary to the
Mancos River. Perhaps they were enterprising young
men and women dissatisfied with the poor and unpro-
gressive life at home. Perhaps they were dissenters
from ancient religious forms, outcasts and pilgrims,
for there is abundant evidence that the prehistoric
sun-worshippers of our southwest were deeply religious,
and human nature is the same under skins of all colors
in every land and age. More likely they were merely
thrifty pioneers attracted to the green cedar-grown
mesas by the hope of better conditions.

Whatever the reason for their pilgrimage, it is a
fair inference that, like our own Pilgrim Fathers, they

were sturdy of body and progressive of spirit, for they

284

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 285

had a culture which their descendants carried beyond
that of other tribes and communities of prehistoric
people in America north of the land of the Aztecs.

Beginning with modest stone structures of the
usual cliff-dwellers' type built in deep clefts in the
mesa's perpendicular cliff, safe from enemies above
and below, these enterprising people developed in
time a complicated architecture of a high order; they
advanced the arts beyond the practice of their fore
fathers and their neighbors; they herded cattle upon
the mesas; they raised corn and melons in clearings
in the forests, and watered their crops in the dry sea
sons by means of simple irrigation systems as soundly
scientific, so far as they went, as those of to-day; out
growing their cliff homes, they invaded the neighbor
ing mesas, where they built pueblos and more am
bitious structures.

Then, apparently suddenly, for they left behind
them many of their household goods, and left unfinished
an elaborate temple to their god, the sun, they van
ished. There is no clew to the reason or the manner
of their going.

Meantime European civilization was pushing in
all directions. Columbus discovered America; De
Soto explored the southeast and ascended the Missis
sippi; Cortez pushed into Mexico and conquered the
Aztecs; Spanish priests carried the gospel north and
west from the Antilles to the continent; Raleigh sent
explorers to Virginia; the Pilgrim Fathers landed in
Massachusetts; the white man pushed the Indian

286 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

aside, and at last the European pioneer sought a pre
carious living on the sands of the southwest.

One December day in 1888 Richard and Alfred
Wetherill hunted lost cattle on the top of one of the
green mesas north and west of the Mancos River.
They knew this mesa well. Many a time before had
they rounded up their herds and stalked the deer
among the thin cedar and pinyon forests. Often,
doubtless, in their explorations of the broad Mancos
Valley below, they had happened upon ruins of primi
tive isolated or grouped stone buildings hidden by sage
brush, half buried in rock and sand. No doubt, around
their ranch fire, they had often speculated concerning
the manner of men that had inhabited these lowly
structures so many years before that sometimes aged
cedars grew upon the broken walls.

But this December day brought the Wetherills the
surprise of their uneventful lives. Some of the cattle
had wandered far, and the search led to the very brink
of a deep and narrow canyon, across which, in a long
deep cleft under the overhang of the opposite cliff,
they saw what appeared to be a city. Those who
have looked upon the stirring spectacle of Cliff Palace
from this point can imagine the astonishment of these
ranchmen.

Whether or not the lost cattle were ever found is
not recorded, but we may assume that living on the
mesa was not plentiful enough to make the Wetherills
forget them in the pleasure of discovering a ruin. But
they lost no time in investigating their find, and soon

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 287

after crossed the canyon and climbed into this prehis
toric city. They named it Cliff Palace, most inap
propriately, by the way, for it was in fact that most
democratic of structures, a community dwelling.
Pushing their explorations farther, presently they dis
covered also a smaller ruin, which they named Spruce
Tree House, because a prominent spruce grew in front
of it. These are the largest two cliff-dwellings in the
Mesa Verde National Park, and, until Doctor J. Walter
Fewkes unearthed Sun Temple in 1915, among the most
extraordinary prehistoric buildings north of Mexico.

There are thousands of prehistoric ruins in our
southwest, and many besides those of the Mesa Verde
are examples of an aboriginal civilization. Hundreds
of canyons tell the story of the ancient cliff-dwellers;
and still more numerous are the remains of communal
houses built of stone or sun-dried brick under the open
sky. These pueblos in the open are either isolated
structures like the lesser cliff-dwellings, or are crowded
together till they touch walls, as in our modern cities;
often they were several stories high, the floors connected
by ladders. Sometimes, for protection against the
elements, whole villages were built in caves. Pueblos
occasionally may be seen from the car-window in New
Mexico. The least modified of the prehistoric type
which are occupied to-day are the eight villages of the
Hopi near the Grand Canyon in Arizona; a suggestive
reproduction of a model pueblo, familiar to many thou
sands who have visited the canyon, stands near the
El Tovar Hotel.

288 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

It was not therefore because of the rarity of pre
historic dwellings of either type that the cliff villages
of the Mesa Verde were conserved as a national park,
nor only because they are the best preserved of all
North American ruins, but because they disclose a
type of this culture in advance of all others.

The builders and inhabitants of these dwellings
were Indians having physical features common to all
American tribes. That their accomplishment differed
in degree from that of the shiftless war-making tribes
north and east of them, and from that of the cultured
and artistic Mayas of Central America, was doubtless
due to differences in conditions of living. The struggle
for bare existence in the southwest, like that of the
habitats of other North American Indians, was in
tense; but these were agriculturalists and protected
by environment. The desert was a handicap, of course,
but it offered opportunity in many places for dry farm
ing; the Indian raised his corn. The winters, too,
were short. It is only in the southwest that enterprise
developed the architecture of stone houses which dis
tinguish pueblo Indians from others in North America.

The dwellers in the Mesa Verde were more for
tunate even than their fellow pueblo dwellers. The
forested mesas, so different from the arid cliffs farther
south and west, possessed constant moisture and fer
tile soil. The grasses lured the deer within capture.
The Mancos River provided fish. Above all, the re
moteness of these fastness canyons from the trails of
raiders and traders and their ease of defense made

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 289

for long generations of peace. The enterprise innate
in the spirit of man did the rest.

The history of the Mesa Verde National Park be
gan with the making of America. All who have trav
elled in the southwest have seen mesas from the car-
window. New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Colorado
and Utah, the region of the pueblos, constitute an ele
vated plateau largely arid. Many millions of years
ago all was submerged in the intercontinental sea; in
fact the region was sea many times, for it rose and fell
alternately, accumulating thousands of feet of sands
and gravels much of which hardened into stone after
the slow great uplifting which made it the lofty plateau
of to-day. Erosion did its work. For a million years
or more the floods of spring have washed down the
sands and gravels, and the rivers have carried them
into the sea. Thousands of vertical feet have disap
peared in this way from the potential altitude of the
region. The spring floods are still washing down the
sands and gravels, and the canyons, cliffs, and mesas of
the desert are disclosed to-day as stages in the eternal
levelling.

Thus were created the canyons and mesas of the
Mesa Verde. Mesa, by the way, is Spanish for table,
and verde for green. These, then, are the green table
lands, forest-covered and during the summer grown
scantily with grass and richly with flowers.

2QO THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The Mesa Verde National Park was created by
act of Congress in June, 1906, and enlarged seven
years later. The Mancos River, on its way to the
San Juan and thence to the Colorado and the passage
of the Grand Canyon, forms its southern boundary.
Scores of canyons, large and small, nearly all dry ex
cept at the spring floods, are tributary. All of these
trend south; in a general way they are parallel. Each
of the greater stems has its lesser tributaries and each
of these its lesser forks. Between the canyons lie the
mesas. Their tops, if continued without break, would
form a more or less level surface; that is, all had been
a plain before floods cut the separating canyons.

The region has a wonderful scenic charm. It is
markedly different in quality from other national parks,
but in its own way is quite as startling and beautiful.
Comparison is impossible because of the lack of ele
ments in common, but it may be said that the Mesa
Verde represents our great southwest in one of its
most fascinating phases, combining the fundamentals
of the desert with the flavor of the near-by moun
tains. The canyons, which are seven or eight hundred
feet deep and two or three times as wide where the
cliff-dwellings gather, are prevailingly tawny yellow.
Masses of sloping talus reach more than half-way up;
above them the cliffs are perpendicular; it is in cavi
ties in these perpendiculars that the cliff- dwellings
hide. Above the cliffs are low growths of yellowish-
green cedar with pinyons and other conifers of darker
foliage. Beneath the trees and covering the many

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 291

opens grows the familiar sage of the desert, a gray
which hints at green and yellow both but realizes
neither. But the sage-brush shelters desert grasses,
and, around the occasional springs and their slender
outlets, grass grows rank and plenteous; a little water
counts for a great deal in the desert.

Summer, then, is delightful on the Mesa Verde.
The plateau is high and the air invigorating, warm by
day in midsummer, always cool at night. The atmos
phere is marvellously clear, and" the sunsets are famous.
The winter snows, which reach three or four feet in
depth, disappear in April. From May to Thanksgiving
the region is in its prime. It is important to realize
that this land has much for the visitor besides its ruins.
It has vigor, distinction, personality, and remarkable
charm. It is the highest example of one of America's
most distinctive and important scenic phases, and this
without reference to its prehistoric dwellings. No
American traveller knows his America, even the great
southwest, who does not know the border-land where
desert and forest mingle.

The Southern Ute Indian Reservation bites a large
rectangle from the southeast corner of the park, but
its inhabitants are very different in quality of mind and
spirit from the ancient and reverent builders of Sun
Temple. Reservation Indians frequently enter the
park, but they cannot be persuaded to approach the
cliff-dwellings. The " little people," they tell you, live
there, and neither teaching nor example will convince
them that these invisible inhabitants will not injure

292 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

intruders. Some of these Indians allege that it was
their own ancestors who built the cliff-dwellings, but
there is neither record nor tradition to support such
a claim. The fact appears to be that the Utes were the
ancient enemies of this people. There is a Ute tradi
tion of a victory over the ancient pueblo-dwellers at
Battle Rock in McElmo Canyon.

There are, on the other hand, many reasons for
the opinion that the Hopi Indians of the present day,
so far at least as culture goes, are descendants of this
remarkable prehistoric people. Besides the many simi
larities between the architectural types of the Mesa
Verde and the pueblos of the modern Hopi, careful
investigators have found suggestive points of similarity
in their utensils, their art forms, and their customs.
Doctor Fewkes cites a rfopi tradition to that effect by
mentioning the visit of a Hopi courier a few years ago
to prehistoric ruins in the Navajo National Monu
ment to obtain water from an ancestral spring for use
in a Hopi religious ceremonial. If these traditions are
founded in fact, the promising civilization of the Mesa
Verde has sadly retrograded in its transplanting. Hopi
architecture and masonry shows marked retrogression
from the splendid types of the Mesa Verde.

When the telephone-line was under construction
to connect the park with the outside world, the In
dians from the adjoining Ute reservation became sus
picious and restless. Upon hearing its purpose, they
begged the superintendent not to go on with the work,
which was certain to bring evil to the neighborhood.

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 293

"The little people," they solemnly declared, "will
not like it."

They assured the superintendent that the wires
would not talk.

"The little people will not let them talk," they
told him.

But the line was completed and the wires talked.

The park is reached by motor and rail. From
Denver, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe railroad routes
offer choice of some of the biggest country of the
Rockies. From either direction a night is spent en
route in a mountain mining- town, an experience which
has its usefulness in preparation for the contrasted and
unusual experience to come. Entrance is through
Mancos, from which motor-stages thread the maze of
canyons and mesas from the highlands of the northern
border to the deep canyons of the south where cluster
the ruins of distinction.

This entry is delightful. The road crosses the
northern boundary at the base of a lofty butte known
as Point Lookout, the park's highest elevation. En
circling its eastern side and crossing the Morefield
Canyon the road perches for several miles upon the
sinuous crest of a ridge more than eight thousand feet
in altitude, whose north side plunges eighteen hundred
feet into the broad Montezuma Valley, and whose
gentle southern slope holds the small beginnings^of the
great canyons of the cliff-dwellers. Both north and
south the panorama unfolds in impressive grandeur,
eloquent of the beautiful scanty land and of the diffi-

294 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

cult conditions of living which confronted the sturdy
builders whose ancient masterpieces we are on our
way to see. At the northern end of Chapin Mesa we
swing sharply south and follow its slope, presently
entering the warm, glowing, scented forests, through
which we speed to the hotel- camp perched upon a bluff
overlooking the depths of Spruce Canyon.

Upon the top and under the eaves of this mesa
are found very fine types of prehistoric civilization.
At Mummy Lake, half-way down the mesa, we passed
on the way a good example of pueblo architecture, and
within an easy walk of our terminal camp we find some
of the noblest examples of cliff- dwellings in existence.
Here it was, near the head of this remote, nearly inac
cessible, canyon, guarded by nature's ramparts, that
aboriginal American genius before the coming of the
Anglo-Saxon found its culminating expression.

In this spirit the thoughtful American of to-day
enters the Mesa Verde National Park and examines
its precious memorials.

Ill

Although the accident of the road brings the trav
eller first to the mesa-top pueblos of the Mummy Lake
district, historical sequence suggests that examination
begin with the cliff-dwellings.

Of the many examples of these remains in the
park, Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House, and Balcony
House are the most important because they concisely
and completely cover the range of life and the fulness

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 295

of development. This is not the place for detailed
descriptions of these ruins. The special publications
of the National Park Service and particularly the writ
ings of Doctor J. Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian
Institution, who has devoted many years of brilliant
investigation to American prehistoric remains, are
obtainable from government sources. Here we shall
briefly consider several types.

It is impossible, without reference to photographs,
to convey a concise adequate idea of Cliff Palace.
Seen from across its canyon the splendid crescent-
shaped ruin offers to the unaccustomed eye little that
is common to modern architecture. Prominently in
the foreground, large circular wells at once challenge
interest. These were the kivas, or ceremonial rooms of
the community, centres of the religious activities which
counted so importantly in pueblo life. Here it was
that men gathered monthly to worship their gods. In
the floors of some kivas are small holes representing
symbolically the entrance to the underworld, and
around these from time to time priests doubtless per
formed archaic ceremonies and communicated with
the dead. Each family or clan in the community is
supposed to have had its own kiva.

The kiva walls of Cliff Palace show some of the
finest prehistoric masonry in America. All are sub
terranean, which in a few instances necessitated ex
cavation in floors of solid rock. The roofs were sup
ported by pedestals rising from mural banquettes,
usually six pedestals to a kiva; the kiva supposed to

296 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

have belonged to the chiefs clan had eight pedestals,
and one, perhaps belonging to a clan of lesser promi
nence, had only two. Several kivas which lack roof-
supports may have been of different type or used for
lesser ceremonials. All except these have fireplaces and
ventilators. Entrance was by ladder from the roof.

Other rooms identified are living-rooms, storage-
rooms, milling-rooms, and round and square towers,
besides which there are dark rooms of unknown use
and several round rooms which are neither kivas nor
towers. Several of the living-rooms have raised
benches evidently used for beds, and in one of them
pegs for holding clothing still remain in the walls.
The rooms are smoothly plastered or painted.

Mills for grinding corn were found in one room in
rows; in others, singly. The work was done by
women, who rubbed the upper stone against the lower
by hand. The rests for their feet while at work still
remain in place; also the brushes for sweeping up the
meal. The small storage- rooms had stone doors, care
fully sealed with clay to keep out mice and prevent
moisture from spoiling the corn and meal.

One of the most striking buildings in Cliff Palace is
the Round Tower, two stories high, which not only
was an observatory, as is indicated by its peep-holes,
but also served purposes in religious festivals. Its
masonry belongs to the finest north of Mexico. The
stones are beautifully fitted and dressed. The Square
Tower which stands at the southern end of the village
is four stories high, reaching the roof of the cave. The

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 297

inner walls of its third story are elaborately painted
with red and white symbols, triangles, zigzags, and
parallels, the significance of which is not known.

The ledge under which Cliff Palace is built forms
a roof that overhangs the structure. An entrance,
probably the principal one, came from below to a court
at a lower level than the floor, from which access was
by ladder.

Spruce Tree House, which may have been built
after Cliff Palace, has a circular room with windows
which were originally supposed to have been port
holes for defense. Doctor Fewkes, however, suggests
a more probable purpose, as the position of the room
does not specially suggest a fortress. Through the
openings in this room the sun-priest may have watched
the setting sun to determine the time for ceremonies.
The room was entered from above, like a kiva. An
other room, differing from any in other cliff-dwellings,
has been named the Warriors* Room because, unlike
sleeping-rooms, its bench surrounds three sides, and
because, unlike any other room, it is built above a
kiva. Only the exigencies of defense, it is supposed,
would warrant so marked a departure from the pre
scribed religious form of room.

Balcony House has special interest, apart from its
commanding location, perfection of workmanship and
unusual beauty, and because of the ingenuity of the
defenses of its only possible entrance. At the top of a
steep trail a cave-like passage between rocks is walled
so as to leave a door capable of admitting only one at

298 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

a time, behind which two or three men could strike
down, one by one, an attacking army.

Out of these simple architectural elements, to
gether with the utensils and weapons found in the ruins,
the imagination readily constructs a picture of the aus
tere, laborious, highly religious, and doubtless happy
lives led by the earnest people who built these ancient
dwellings in the caves.

When all the neighborhood caves were filled to
overflowing with increasing population, and generations
of peace had wrought a confidence which had not ex
isted when the pioneers had sought safety in caves,
these people ventured to move out of cliffs and to build
upon the tops of the mesa. Whether all the cave-
dwellers were descended from the original pilgrims or
whether others had joined them afterward is not
known, but it seems evident that the separate commu
nities had found some common bond, probably tribal,
and perhaps evolved some common government. No
doubt they intermarried. No doubt the blood of many
cliff-dwelling communities mingled in the new commu
nities which built pueblos upon the mesa. In time
there were many of these pueblos, and they were widely
scattered; there are mounds at intervals all over the
Mesa Verde. The largest group of pueblos, one infers
from the number of visible mounds, was built upon the
Chapin Mesa several miles north of the above-men
tioned cliff-dwelling near a reservoir known to-day as
Mummy Lake. It is there, then, that we shall now
go in continuation of our story.

PREHISTORIC POTTERY FROM MESA VERDE
Coloring and design as well as form show high artistic sense and clean workmanship

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 299

Mummy Lake is not a lake and no mummies
were ever found there. This old-time designation
applies to an artificial depression surrounded by a
low rude stone wall, much crumbled, which was evi
dently a storage reservoir for an irrigation system of
some size. A number of conspicuous mounds in the
neighborhood suggest the former existence of a village
of pueblos dependent upon the farms for which the
irrigation system had been built. One of these, from
which a few stones protruded, was excavated in 1916
by Doctor Fewkes, and has added a new and important
chapter to the history of this people. This pueblo has
been named Far View House. Its extensive vista in
cludes four other groups of similar mounds. Each
cluster occurs in the fertile sage-brush clearings which
bloom in summer with asters and Indian paint-brush;
there is no doubt that good crops of Indian corn could
still be raised from these sands to-day by dry-farming
methods.

Far View House is a pueblo, a hundred and thir
teen feet long by more than fifty feet wide, not includ
ing a full-length plaza about thirty-five feet wide in
which religious dances are supposed to have taken
place. The differences between this fine structure and
the cliff-cities are considerable. The most significant
evidence of progress, perhaps, is the modern regularity
of the ground-plan. The partitions separating the
secular rooms are continuous through the building, and
the angles are generally accurately right angles.

The pueblo had three stories. It is oriented ap-

300 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

proximately to the cardinal points and was terraced
southward to secure a sunny exposure. The study of
the solar movements became an advanced science with
these people in the latter stages of their development.
It must be remembered that they had no compasses;
knowing nothing of the north or any other fixed point,
nevertheless there is evidence that they successfully
worked out the solstices and planned their later build
ings accurately according to cardinal points of their
own calculation.

Another difference indicating development is the
decrease in the number of kivas, and the construction
of a single very large kiva in the middle of the build
ing. Its size suggests at once that the individual clan
organization of cliff -dwelling days had here given place
to a single priestly fraternity, sociologically a marked
advance. Drawing parallels with the better-known
customs of other primitive people, we are at liberty,
if we please, to infer similar progress in other direc
tions. The original primitive communism was devel
oping naturally, though doubtless very slowly, into
something akin to organized society, probably involv
ing more complicated economic relationships in all
departments of living.

While their masonry did not apparently improve
in proportion, Far View House shows increase in the
number and variety of the decorative figures incised
on hewn stones. The spiral, representing the coiled
serpent, appears a number of times, as do many com
binations of squares, curves, and angles arranged in

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 301

fanciful design, which may or may not have had sym
bolic meanings.

A careful examination of the neighborhood dis
closes few details of the irrigation system, but it shows
a cemetery near the southeast corner of the building in
which the dead were systematically buried.

Large numbers of minor antiquities were found in
this interesting structure. Besides the usual stone
implements of the mason and the housekeeper, many
instruments of bone, such as needles, dirks, and bod
kins, were found. Figurines of several kinds were un
earthed, carved from soft stone, including several in
tended to symbolize Indian corn; all these may have
been idols. Fragments of pottery were abundant, in
full variety of form, decoration, and color, but always
the most ancient types. Among the bones of animals,
the frequency of those of rabbits, deer, antelope, elk,
and mountain-sheep indicate that meat formed no in
considerable part of the diet. Fabrics and embroi
deries were not discovered, as in the cliff -dwellings, but
they may have disappeared in the centuries through
exposure to the elements. - .

Far View House may not show the highest devel
opment of the Mummy Lake cluster of pueblos, and
further exhumations here and in neighboring groups
may throw further light upon this interesting people
in their gropings from darkness to light. Meantime,
however, returning to the neighborhood of the cliff-
dwellings, let us examine a structure so late in the
history of these people that they left it unfinished.

302 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Sun Temple stands on a point of Chapin Mesa,
somewhat back from the edge of Cliff Canyon, com
manding an extraordinary range of country. It is
within full view of Cliff Palace and other cliff -dwellings
of importance and easy of access. From it, one can
look southward to the Mancos River. On every side
a wide range of mesa and canyon lies in full view. The
site is unrivalled for a temple in which all could
worship with devotion.

When Doctor Fewkes, in the early summer of 1915,
attacked the mound which had been designated Com
munity House under the supposition that it covered
a ruined pueblo, he had no idea of the extraordinary
nature of the find awaiting him, although he was pre
pared from its shape and other indications for some
thing out of the usual. So wholly without parallel was
the disclosure, however, that it was not till it was en
tirely uncovered that he ventured a public conjecture
as to its significance. The ground-plan of Sun Temple
is shaped like the letter D. It encloses another D-
shaped structure occupying nearly two-thirds of its
total area, within which are two large kivas. Between
the outer and the inner D are passages and rooms, and
at one end a third kiva is surrounded by rooms, one of
which is circular.

Sun Temple is also impressive in size. It is a
hundred and twenty-one feet long and sixty-four feet
wide. Its walls average four feet in thickness, and are
double-faced, enclosing a central core of rubble; they
are built of the neighborhood sandstone. The masonry

From a photograph by George L. Beam

SUN TEMPLE, MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK
Built, by prehistoric people to their god, the sun, and unfinished when they suddenly disappeared

From a photograph by George L. Beam

SPRUCE TREE HOUSE FROM ACROSS THE CANYON
Showing the overhanging rock roof and the forest which tops the Mesa Verde

ROCK RECORDS OF A VANISHED RACE 303

is of fine quality. This, together with its symmetrical
architectural design, its fine proportions, and its many
decorated stones, mark it the highest type of Mesa
Verde architecture.

It was plainly unfinished. Walls had risen in
some places higher than in others. As yet there was
no roofing. No rooms had been plastered. Of in
ternal finishing little was completed, and of contents,
of course, there was none. The stone hammers and
other utensils of the builders were found lying about
as if thrown down at day's close.

The kivas, although circular, are unlike those of
Cliff Palace, inasmuch as they are above ground, not
subterranean. The mortar used in pointing shows the
impress of human hands; no trowels were used. The
walls exhibit many stones incised with complicated
designs, largely geometric; some may be mason's
marks; others are decorative or symbolic. These de
signs indicate a marked advance over those in Far
View House; in fact they are far more complicated
and artistic than any in the southwest.

Bare and ineloquent though its unfinished condi
tion left it, the religious purposes of the entire build
ing are clear to the archaeologist in its form. And, as
if to make conjecture certainty, a shrine was uncovered
on the corner-stone of the outer wall which frames in
solid stone walls a large fossil palm-leaf whose rays
strongly suggest the sun !

It requires no imagination to picture the effect
which the original discovery of this image of their god

3o4 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

must have had upon a primitive community of sun-
worshippers. It must have seemed to them a divine
gift, a promise, like the Ark of the Covenant, of the
favor of the Almighty. It may even have first sug
gested the idea of building this temple to their deity.

This is all the story. Go there and study it in
detail. Enlightened, profoundly impressed, neverthe
less you will finish at this point. The tale has no
climax. It just stops.

What happened to the people of the Mesa Verde?

Some archaeologists believe that they emigrated
to neighboring valleys southwest. But why should
they have left their prosperous farms and fine homes
for regions which seem to us less desirable? And why,
a profoundly religious people, should they have left
Sun Temple unfinished?

What other supposition remains?

Only, I think, that, perhaps because of their pros
perity and the unpreparedness that accompanies long
periods of peace, they were suddenly overwhelmed by
enemies.

THE HEALING WATERS

HOT SPRINGS RESERVATION, ARKANSAS. PLATT NATIONAL
PARK, OKLAHOMA

FROM a hillside on the edge of the Ozark Moun
tains in central Arkansas issue springs of hot
water which are effective in the alleviation of rheu
matic and kindred ills. Although chemical analysis
fails to explain the reason, the practice of many years
has abundantly proved their worth. Before the com
ing of the white man they were known to the Indians,
who are said to have proclaimed them neutral terri
tory in time of war. Perhaps it was rumor of their
fame upon which Ponce de Leon founded his dream of
a Fountain of Youth.

In the early years of the last century hundreds of
settlers toiled many miles over forest trails to camp
beside them and bathe daily in their waters. The
bent and suffering were carried there on stretchers.
So many and so striking were the cures that the fame
of these springs spread throughout the young nation,
and in 1832, to prevent their falling into hands out
stretched to seize and exploit them for private gain,
Congress created them a national reservation. The

Hot Springs Reservation was our first national park.

305

3o6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Previous to this a couple of log houses built by
visitors served for shelter for the pilgrims at the shrine
of health. Soon after, other buildings quite as primi
tive were erected. A road was constructed through
the forests from the settled portions of the State, and
many drove laboriously in with tents and camping
outfits. I have seen a copy of a photograph which
was taken when photographs were new, showing several
men and women in the odd conventional costume of
that period sitting solemnly upon the banks of a
steaming spring, their clothes drawn up, their bare
legs calf deep in the hot water.

Once started, Hot Springs grew rapidly. Unfor
tunately, this first act of national conservation failed
to foresee the great future of these springs, and the
reservation line was drawn so that it barely enclosed
the brook of steaming vapors which was their outlet.
To-day, when the nation contemplates spending mil
lions to beautify the national spa, it finds the city
built solidly opposite.

Railroads soon pushed their way through the
Ozark foot-hills and landed thousands yearly beside
the healing waters. Hotels became larger and more
numerous. The government built a public bath
house into which the waters were piped for the free
treatment of the people. Concessioners built more
elaborate structures within the reservation to accom
modate those who preferred to pay for pleasanter
surroundings or for private treatment. The village
became a town and the town a city. Boarding-

THE HEALING WATERS 307

houses sprang up everywhere with accommodations to
suit the needs of purses of all lengths. Finally, large
and costly hotels were built for the prosperous and
fashionable who began to find rare enjoyment in the
beautiful Ozark country while they drank their hot
water and took their invigorating baths. Hot Springs
became a national resort.

It will be seen that, in its way, Hot Springs has
reflected the social development of the country. It has
passed through the various stages that marked the
national growth in taste and morals. During the
period when gambling was a national vice it was noted
for its high play, and then gamblers of all social grades
looked forward to their season in the South. During
the period of national dissipation, when polite drunk
enness was a badge of class and New Year's day an
orgy, it became the periodic resort of inebriates, just
as later, with the elevation of the national moral sense,
it became instead the most conservative of resorts,
the periodic refuge of thousands of work-worn business
and professional men seeking the astonishing recupera
tive power of its water.

True again to the spirit of the times, Hot Springs
reflects to the full the spirit of to-day. It is a Southern
mountain resort of quiet charm and wonderful natural
beauty set on the edge of a broad region of hills, ra
vines, and sweet-smelling pines, a paradise for the
walker, the hiker, and the horseback rider. Down on
the street a long row of handsome modern bath-houses,
equipped with all the scientific luxuries, and more be-

308 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

sides, of the most elaborate European spa, concen
trates the business of bath and cure. Back of this rise
directly the beautiful Ozark hills. One may have
exactly what he wishes at Hot Springs. He may live
with the sick if that is his bent, or he may spend weeks
of rich enjoyment of the South in holiday mood, and
have his baths besides, without a suggestion of the
sanitarium or even of the spa.

Meantime the mystery of the water's potency
seems to have been solved. It is not chemical in
solution which clears the system of its ills and restores
the jaded tissues to buoyancy, but the newly discov
ered principle of radioactivity. Somewhere deep in
Nature's laboratory these waters become charged with
an uplifting power which is imparted to those who
bathe according to the rules which many years of ex
perience have prescribed. Many physicians refuse to
verify the waters' virtues; some openly scoff. But
the fact stands that every year hundreds who come
helpless cripples walk jauntily to the station on their
departure, and many thousands of sufferers from rheu
matic ills and the wear and tear of strenuous living
return to their homes restored. I myself can testify
to the surprising recuperative effect of only half a
dozen daily baths, and I know business men who
habitually go there whenever the stress of overwork
demands measures of quick relief.

It is not surprising that more than a hundred
thousand persons visit Hot Springs every year. The
recognized season begins after the winter holidays;

ON HOT SPRINGS MOUNTAIN, HOT SPRINGS o.

BATH HOUSE ROW, HOT SPRINGS OF ARKANSAS

THE HEALING WATERS 309

then it is that gayety and pleasuring, riding, driving,
motoring, golfing, and the social life of the fashionable
hotels reach their height. But, for sheer enjoyment of
the quieter kind, the spring, early summer, and the
autumn are unsurpassed; south though it lies, Hot
Springs is delightful even in midsummer.

Two railroads land the visitor almost at the en
trance of the reservation. A fine road brings the
motorist sixty miles from the lively city of Little Rock.
The elaborate bath-houses line the reservation side of
the principal street, opposite the brick city. But back
of them rises abruptly the beautiful forested mountain
from whose side gush the healing waters, and back of
this roll the beautiful pine-grown Ozarks. The divi
sion is sharply drawn. He who chooses may forget
the city except at the hour of his daily bath.

The plans for realizing in stone and landscape
gardening the ideal of the great American spa, which
this spot is in fact, contemplate the work of years.

11 .

In southern Oklahoma not far from the Texas
boundary, a group of thirty healing springs, these of
cold sparkling water, were set apart by Congress in
1904 under the title of the Platt National Park. Most
of them are sulphur springs; others are impregnated
with bromides and other mineral salts. Many thou
sands visit yearly the prosperous bordering city of
Sulphur to drink these waters; many camp in or near

3io THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

the reservation; the bottled waters bring relief to
thousands at home.

Through the national park, from its source in the
east to its entry into Rock Creek, winds Travertine
Creek, the outlet of most of these springs. Rock Creek
outlines the park's western boundary, and on its farther
bank lies the city. Springs of importance within the
park pour their waters directly into its current. All
these Platt springs, like those of Hot Springs, Arkansas,
were known to the Indians for their curative properties
for many generations before the coming of the white
settler.

The park is the centre of a region of novelty and
charm for the visitor from the North and East. The
intimate communion of prairie and rich forested valley,
the sophistication of the bustling little city in contrast
with the rough life of the outlying ranches, the mingling
in common intercourse of such differing human ele
ments as the Eastern tourist, the free and easy Western
townsman, the cowboy and the Indian, give rare spice
to a visit long enough to impart the spirit of a country
of so many kinds of appeal. The climate, too, contrib
utes to enjoyment. The long spring lasts from Feb
ruary to June. During the short summer, social life
is at its height. The fall lingers to the holidays before
it gives way to a short winter, which the Arbuckle
Mountains soften by diverting the colder winds.

The pleasures are those of prairie and valley. It
is a great land for riding. There is swimming, rowing,
and excellent black-bass fishing in the larger lakes.

THE HEALING WATERS 311

It is a region of deer and many birds. Its altitude is
about a thousand feet.

The rolling Oklahoma plateau attains in this
neighborhood its pleasantest outline and variety.
Broad plains of grazing-land alternate with bare rocky
heights and low mountains. The creeks and rivers
which accumulate the waters of the springs scattered
widely among these prairie hills are outlined by wind
ing forested belts and flowered thickets of brush.
Great areas of thin prairie yield here and there to
rounded hills, some of which bear upon their summits
columns of flat rocks heaped one upon the other high
enough to be seen for miles against the low horizon.

These, which are known as the Chimney Hills, for
many years have been a cause of speculation among
the settlers who have nearly replaced the Indians since
the State of Oklahoma replaced the Indian Territory
with which we became familiar in the geographies of
earlier days. Who were the builders of these chimneys
and what was their purpose ?

"At a hearing in Ardmore a few years ago before
a United States court taking testimony upon some
ancient Indian depredation claims," writes Colonel
R. A. Sneed, for years the superintendent of the Platt
National Park, " practically all the residents of the
Chickasaw Nation, Indian and negro, whose memories
of that country extend back fifty years or more, were
in attendance. In recounting his recollections of a
Comanche raid in which his master's horses were
stolen, one old negro incidentally gave a solution of

312 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

the Chimney Hills which is the only one the writer
ever heard, and which probably accounts for all of
them.

"He said that his master lived at Big Sulphur
Springs, farthest west of any of the Chickasaws; that
the Kiowas and Comanches raided the country every
summer and drove out horses or cattle wherever they
could find them unprotected; that he had often gone
with his master to find these stolen cattle; that these
forages were so frequent that the Chickasaws had never
undertaken to occupy any of their lands west of Rock
Creek, north of Big Sulphur Springs, nor west of the
Washita River south of the springs; that the country
west of Sulphur Springs was dry, and water was hard
to find unless one knew just where to look; and that
the Comanches had a custom of marking all the springs
they could find by building rock chimneys on the hills
nearest to the springs. Only one chimney would be
built if the spring flowed from beneath the same hill,
but if the spring was distant from the hill two chimneys
would be built, either upon the same hill or upon two
distant hills, and a sight along the two chimneys would
indicate a course toward the spring.

"The old man said that every hill in their pasture
had a Comanche chimney on it and that his master
would not disturb them because he did not want to
make the wild Indians mad. There never was open
war between the Chickasaws and the Comanches, but
individual Chickasaws often had trouble with Co
manche hunting-parties.

THE HEALING WATERS 313

"The Big Sulphur Springs on Rock Creek in the
Chickasaw Nation afterward became the centre around
which the city of Sulphur was built, and after the town
was grown to a population of two thousand or more
it was removed bodily to make room for the Platt
National Park, around which has been built the new
city of Sulphur, which now has a population of forty-
five hundred.

"Many of the Comanche monuments are extant
and the great bluff above the Bromide Springs of the
national park looks out toward the north and west
over a prairie that extends to the Rocky Mountains;
the monument that stood on the brow of that bluff
must have been visible for many miles to the keen
vision of the Comanche who knew how to look
for it."

The Indian Territory became the State of Okla
homa in 1907; the story of the white man's peaceful
invasion is one of absorbing interest; the human
spectacle of to-day is complex, even kaleidoscopic.
In the thirties and forties the government had estab
lished in the territory the five civilized Indian nations,
the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and
Seminoles, each with its allotted boundaries, its native
government, its legislatures, and its courts. In many
respects these were foreign nations within our bound
aries. Besides them, the Osage Indians had their
reservation in the north, and fragments of no less than
seventeen other tribes lived on assigned territory.

Gradually white men invaded the land, purchased

314 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

holdings from the Indian nations, built cities, estab
lished businesses of many kinds, ran railroads in all
directions. In time, the nations were abolished and
their remaining lands were divided up among the
individuals composing them; the Indians of these
nations became American citizens; their negro slaves,
for they had been large slaveholders, received each
his portion of the divided land. Then came Okla
homa.

To-day there is only one Indian reservation in
the State, that of the Osages. Oil has been found on
their land and they are the wealthiest people in the
world to-day, the average cash income of each exceed
ing five thousand dollars a year. In a state with a
total population of two and a quarter millions live
336,000 Indians representing twenty- three tribes and
110,000 negroes descended from slaves. There has
been much intermarrying between Indians and whites,
and some between Indians and blacks. Here is a
mixture of races to baffle the keenest eye.

Elsewhere than in the Osage Reservation, wealth
also has come to the Indians. Many have very large
incomes, large even for the rich of our Eastern cities.
Asphalt also has enriched many. Cotton is raised
extensively in the southern counties. Grazing on a
large scale has proved profitable. Many Indians own
costly and luxurious homes, ride in automobiles, and
enter importantly into business, politics, and the pro
fessions; these usually have more or less white blood.
Many full-bloods who have grown rich without effort

THE HEALING WATERS 315

possess finely furnished bedrooms, and sleep on the
floor in blankets; elaborate dining-rooms with costly
table equipments, and eat cross-legged on the kitchen
floor; gas-ranges, and cook over chip fires out-of-
doors; automobiles, and ride blanketed ponies. Many
wealthy men are deeply in debt because of useless
luxuries which they have been persuaded to buy.

Platt National Park lies about the centre of what
was once the Chickasaw nation. It is a grazing and
a cotton country. There are thousands of Indians,
many of them substantial citizens, some men of local
influence. Native dress is seldom seen.

Quoting again from my correspondence with Col
onel Sneed, here is the legend of the last of the Dela-
wares:

"Along about 1840, a very few years after the
Chickasaws and Choctaws had arrived in Indian Ter
ritory, a small band of about sixty Delaware Indians
arrived in the Territory, having roved from Alabama
through Mississippi and Missouri, and through the
northwest portion of Arkansas. Being a small band,
they decided to link their fortunes with those of some
other tribe of Indians, and they first pitched their te
pees with those of the Cherokees. But the Cherokee
Chief and old Chief Wahpanucka of the Delawares
did not agree. So the little band of Delawares con
tinued rambling until they reached the Choc taw Nation,
where they again tried to make terms with the Chief
of the tribe. Evidently no agreement was reached
between that Chief and Wahpanucka, for the Delawares

3i6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

continued their roving until they reached the Chicka-
saw Nation, where they remained.

"Old Chief Wahpanucka had a beautiful daughter
whose name was Deerface; two of the Delaware braves
were much in love with her, but Deerface could not
decide which one of these warriors she should take to
become Chief after the death of Wahpanucka.

"Chief Wahpanucka called the two warriors be
fore him and a powwow was agreed upon. The coun
cil was held around the Council Rocks (which is now
a point of interest within the Platt National Park),
and a decision was reached to the effect that at a cer
tain designated time the Delawares should all assemble
on the top of the Bromide Cliff, at the foot of which
flow the now famous Bromide and Medicine Springs,
and that the two braves should ride their Indian ponies
to the edge of the cliff, which was at that time known
as Medicine Bluff, and jump off to the bed of the creek
about two hundred feet below. The one who survived
was to marry Deerface, and succeed Wahpanucka as
Chief of the Delawares.

"The race was run and both Indian braves made
the jump from the bluff, but both were killed. When
Deerface saw this she threw herself from the bluff
and died at the foot of the cliff where her lovers had
met their death. To-day her image may be seen in
delibly fixed on one of the rocks of the cliff where she
fell, and the water of the Medicine Spring is sup
posed to be the briny tears of the old Chief when he
saw the havoc his decision had wrought. These tears,

THE HEALING WATERS 317

filtering down through the cliff where the old Chief
stood, are credited with being so purified that the water
of the spring which they form is possessed with remedial
qualities which make it a cure for all human ailments."

THE GRAND CANYON AND OUR
NATIONAL MONUMENTS

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST

TO most Americans the southwest means the des
ert, and it is true that most of Arizona, New
Mexico, and Utah, and portions of Colorado and south
ern California, are arid or semiarid lands, relieved, how
ever, by regions of fertility and agricultural pros
perity. In popular conception the desert has been
the negative of all that means beauty, richness, and
sublimity; it has been the synonym of poverty and
death. Gradually but surely the American public is
learning that again popular conception is wrong, that
the desert is as positive a factor in scenery as the
mountain, that it has its own glowing beauty, its own
intense personality, and occasionally, in its own amaz
ing way, a sublimity as gorgeous, as compelling, and
as emotion-provoking as the most stupendous snow
capped range.

The American desert region includes some of the
world's greatest scenery. The Grand Canyon of the
Colorado River is sunk in a plateau which, while
sprinkled with scant pine, is nearly rainless. Zion
Canyon is a palette of brilliant color lying among golden
sands. A score of national monuments conserve large
natural bridges, forests of petrified trees, interesting
volcanic or other phenomena of prehistoric times,
areas of strange cactus growths, deposits of the bones

of monstrous reptiles, and remains of a civilization

321

322 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

which preceded the discovery of America; and, in
addition to these, innumerable places of remarkable
magnificence as yet unknown except to the geologist,
the topographer, the miner, the Indian, and the ad
venturer in unfrequented lands.

This arid country consists of rolling sandy plains
as broad as seas, dotted with gray sage-brush and re
lieved by bare craggy monadnocks and naked ranges
which the rising and the setting sun paints unbelievable
colors. Here and there thin growths of cottonwood
outline thin ribbons of rivers, few and far between.
Here and there alkali whitens the edges of stained
hollows where water lies awhile after spring cloud
bursts. Here and there are salt ponds with no outlet.
Yet even in the desolation of its tawny monoto
ny it has a fascination which is insistent and cumu
lative.

But the southwest is not all desert. There are
great areas of thin grazing ranges and lands where dry
farming yields fair crops. There are valleys which
produce fruits and grains in abundance. There are
hamlets and villages and cities which are among the
oldest in America, centres of fertile tracts surrounded
by deserts which need only water to become the rich
est lands on the continent. There are regions reclaimed
by irrigation where farming has brought prosperity.
In other places the plateau covers itself for hundreds
of square miles with scrubby pine and cedar.

All in all, it is a land of rare charm and infinite
variety.

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST 323

To appreciate a region which more and more will
enter into American consciousness and divide travel
with the mountains, the reader should know something
of its structural history.

The southwestern part of the United States rose
above sea-level and sank below it many times during
the many thousands of centuries preceding its present
state, which is that of a sandy and generally desert
plateau, five to ten thousand feet in altitude. How
many times it repeated the cycle is not fully known.
Some portions of it doubtless were submerged oftener
than others. Some were lifting while others were low
ering. And, meantime, mountains rose and were car
ried away by erosion to give place to other mountains
which also wore away; river systems formed and dis
appeared, lakes and inland seas existed and ceased to
exist. The history of our southwest would have been
tempestuous indeed had it been compassed within say
the life of one man; but, spread over a period of time
inconceivable to man, there may have been no time
when it might have seemed to be more active in change
than its still hot deserts seem to-day to the traveller
in passing trains.

Other parts of the continent, no doubt, have un
dergone as many changes; our southwest is not singu
lar in that. But nowhere else, perhaps, has the change
left evidences so plain and so interesting to the unsci
entific observer. The page of earth's history is more
easily read upon the bare deserts of our southwest than
on the grass-concealed prairies of the Mississippi

324 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Valley or the eroded and forested ranges of the Ap
palachians.

Before the Rockies and the Sierra even existed, in
the shallow sea which covered this part of the con
tinent were deposited the ooze which later, when this
region rose above the sea, became the magnificent
limestones of the Grand Canyon. Muds accumulated
which to-day are seen in many highly colored shales.
Long ages of erosion from outlying mountain regions
spread it thick with gravels and sands which now ap
pear in rocky walls of deep canyons. A vast plain
was built up and graded by these deposits. The trunks
of trees washed down by the floods from far distant
uplands were buried in these muds and sands, where,
in the course of unnumbered centuries, they turned to
stone. They are the petrified forests of to-day.

Mountains, predecessors of our modern Sierra,
lifted in the south and west, squeezed the moisture
from the Pacific winds, and turned the region into
desert. This was in the Jurassic Period. Sands thou
sands of feet deep were accumulated by the desert
winds which are to-day the sandstones of the giant
walls of Zion Canyon.

But this was not the last desert, for again the
region sank below the sea. Again for half a million
years or more ooze settled upon the sands to turn to
limestone millions of years later. In this Jurassic sea
sported enormous marine monsters whose bones set
tled to the bottom to be unearthed in our times, and
great flying reptiles crossed its water.

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST 325

Again the region approached sea-level and accu
mulated, above its new limestones, other beds of sands.
New river systems formed and brought other accumu
lations from distant highlands. It was then a low
swampy plain of enormous size, whose northern limits
reached Montana, and which touched what now is
Kansas on its east. Upon the borders of its swamps,
in Cretaceous times, lived gigantic reptiles, the Di
nosaurs and their ungainly companions whose bones
are found to-day in several places.

For the last time the region sank and a shallow
sea swept from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
Again new limestones formed, and as the surface very
slowly rose for the last time at the close of the Cre
taceous Period many new deposits were added to the
scenic exhibit of to-day.

Meantime other startling changes were making
which extended over a lapse of time which human
mind cannot grasp. Responding to increasing pres
sures from below, the continent was folding from north
to south. The miracle of the making of the Rockies
was enacting.

During all of Tertiary times earth movements of
tremendous energy rocked and folded the crust and
hastened change. The modern Sierra rose upon the
eroded ruins of its predecessor, again shutting off the
moisture-laden western winds and turning the south
west again into a desert. One of the mountain-
building impulses spread eastward from the Sierra to
the Wasatch Mountains, but Nature's project for this

326 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

vast granite-cored table-land never was realized, for
continually its central sections caved and fell. And
so it happened that the eastern edge of the Sierra and
the western edge of the Wasatch Mountains became
the precipitous edges, thousands of feet high, of a
mountain-studded desert which to-day is called the
Great Basin. It includes southeastern Oregon, nearly
all of Nevada, the western half of Utah, and a large
area in the south of California, besides parts of Idaho
and Wyoming. It is 880 miles north and south and
572 miles wide. Its elevation is five thousand feet,
more or less, and its area more than two hundred
thousand square miles.

This enormous bowl contained no outlet to the sea,
and the rivers which flowed into it from all its moun
tainous borders created a prehistoric lake with an
area of fifty-four thousand square miles which was
named Lake Bonne ville after the army officer whose
adventures in 1833 were narrated by Washington
Irving; but it was Fremont who first clearly described
it. Lake Bonneville has evaporated and disappeared,
but in its place are many salty lakes, the greatest of
which is Great Salt Lake in Utah. Attenuated rivers
still flow into the Great Basin, but are lost in their
sands. The greatest of these, the Mohave River, is a
hundred miles long, but is not often seen because it
hides its waters chiefly under the surface sands. Lake
Bonneville's prehistoric beaches exist to-day. Trans
continental passengers by rail cross its ancient bed,
but few know it.

ON THE SCENERY OF THE SOUTHWEST 327

The Great Basin to-day is known to travellers
principally by the many lesser deserts which compose
it, deserts separated from each other by lesser moun
tain ranges and low divides. Its southern and south
eastern boundaries are the plateaus and mountains
which form the northern watershed of the muddy
Colorado River and its confluents. South of the
Colorado, the plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, and
southern California gradually subside to the Rio
Grande.

During this period and the Quaternary which fol
lowed it, volcanoes appeared in many places; their
dead cones diversify our modern landscape. It was
during the Quaternary Period, in whose latter end
lives man, that erosion dug the mighty canyons of our
great southwest. The Colorado was sweeping out the
Grand Canyon at the same time that, far in the north,
the glaciers of the Great Ice Age were carving from
Algonkian shales and limestones the gorgeous cirques
and valleys of Glacier National Park.

XVI
A PAGEANT OF CREATION

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZONA. AREA, 958
SQUARE MILES

F INHERE is only one Grand Canyon. It lies in
JL northern Arizona, and the Colorado River, one
of the greatest of American rivers, flows through its
inner gorge. It must not be confused with the Grand
Canyon of the Yellowstone, or with any of the grande
canons which the Spaniards so named because they
were big canyons.

The Grand Canyon is 217 miles long, 8 to 12 miles
wide at the rim, and more than a mile deep. It is
the Colossus of canyons, by far the hugest example of
stream erosion in the world. It is gorgeously colored.
It is by common consent the most stupendous spectacle
in the world. It may be conceived as a mountain
range reversed. Could its moulded image, similarly
colored, stand upon the desert floor, it would be a
spectacle second only to the vast mould itself.

More than a hundred thousand persons visit the
Grand Canyon each year. In other lands it is our
most celebrated scenic possession. It was made a
national park in 1919.

The Grand Canyon is not of America but of the

world. Like the Desert of Sahara and the monster

328

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 329

group of the Himalayas, it is so entirely the greatest
example of its kind that it refuses limits. This is true
of it also as a spectacle; far truer, in fact, for, if it is
possible to compare things so dissimilar, in this respect
certainly it will lead all others. None see it without
being deeply moved — all to silence, some even to tears.
It is charged to the rim with emotion; but the emotion
of the first view varies. Some stand astounded at its
vastness. Others are stupefied and search their souls
in vain for definition. Some tremble. Some are up
lifted with a sense of appalling beauty. For a time
the souls of all are naked in the presence.

This reaction is apparent in the writings of those
who have visited it; no other spectacle in America
has inspired so large a literature. Joaquin Miller
found it fearful, full of glory, full of God. Charles
Dudley Warner pronounced it by far the most sub
lime of earthly spectacles. William Winter saw it a
pageant of ghastly desolation. Hamlin Garland found
its lines chaotic and disturbing but its combinations
of color and shadow beautiful. Upon John Muir it
bestowed a new sense of earth's beauty.

Marius R. Campbell, whose geological researches
have familiarized him with Nature's scenic gamut, told
me that his first day on the rim left him emotionally
cold; it was not until he had lived with the spectacle
that realization slowly dawned. I think this is the
experience of very many, a fact which renders still more
tragic a prevailing public assumption that the Grand
Canyon is a one-day stop in a transcontinental journey.

330 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

It is not surprising that wonder is deeply stirred
by its vastness, its complexity, and the realization of
Nature's titanic labor in its making. It is far from
strange that extreme elation sometimes follows upon
a revelation so stupendous and different. That beauty
so extraordinary should momentarily free emotion from
control is natural enough. But why the expressions
of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the
printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired
of many of our own day without finding one, even
among the most sensitive, whom it repelled. Perhaps
a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of
an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E.
Dutton hid in a technical geological paper of 1880.
"The lover of nature," he wrote, "whose perceptions
have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany,
or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras,
in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange
region with a shock and dwell there with a sense of
oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever
things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble
he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might
see would appear to him as anything but beautiful or
noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would
seem at first only grotesque. The colors would be the
very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry or bizarre.
The tones and shades, modest and tender, Subdued
yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken Special
delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously
absent."

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 331

I suspect that this repulsion, this horror, as several
have called it, was born of the conventions of an earlier
generation which bound conceptions of taste and
beauty, as of art, dress, religion, and human relations
generally, in shackles which do not exist in these days
of individualism and broad horizons. To-day we see
the Grand Canyon with profound astonishment but
without prejudice. Its amazing size, its bewildering
configuration, its unprecedented combinations of color
affect the freed and elated consciousness of our times
as another and perhaps an ultimate revelation in nature
of law, order, and beauty.

In these pages I shall make no attempt to describe
the Grand Canyon. Nature has written her own de
scription, graving it with a pen of water in rocks which
run the series of the eternal ages. Her story can be
read only in the original; translations are futile.
Here I shall try only to help a little in the reading.

The Grand Canyon was cut by one of the great
rivers of the continent, the Colorado, which enters
Arizona from the north and swings sharply west;
thence it turns south to form most of Arizona's western
boundary, and a few miles over the Mexican border
empties into the head of the Gulf of California. It
drains three hundred thousand square miles of Arizona,
Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. It is formed in Utah
by the confluence of the Green and the Grand Rivers.

332 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Including the greater of these, the Green River, it
makes a stream fifteen hundred miles in length which
collects the waters of the divide south and east of the
Great Basin and of many ranges of the Rocky Moun
tain system. The Grand River, for its contribution,
collects the drainage of the Rockies' mighty western
slopes in Colorado.

The lower reaches of these great tributaries and
practically all of the Colorado River itself flow through
more than five hundred miles of canyons which they
were obliged to dig through the slowly upheaving
sandstone plateaus in order to maintain their access
to the sea. Succeeding canyons bear names desig
nating their scenic or geologic character. Progressively
southward they score deeper into the strata of the
earth's crust until, as they approach their climax,
they break through the bottom of the Paleozoic lime-
stoHe deep into the heart of the Archean gneiss. This
limestone trench is known as the Marble Canyon, the
Archean trench as the Granite Gorge. The lower part
of the Marble Canyon and all the Granite Gorge,
together with their broad, vividly colored and fantas
tically carved upper canyon ten miles across from rim
to rim, a mile high from water to rim-level, the climax
of the world of canyons and the most gorgeous spec
tacle on earth, is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
It lies east and west in the northern part of the State.

To comprehend it, recall one of those ditches which
we all have seen crossing level fields or bordering
country roads. It is broad from rim to rim and deeply

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 333

indented by the side washes which follow heavy
showers. Its sides descend by terraces, steep in
places with gentle slopes between the steeps, and on
these slopes are elevations of rock or mud which floods
have failed to wash away. Finally, in the middle, is
the narrow trench which now, in dry weather, carries
a small trickling stream. Not only does this ditch
roughly typify the Grand Canyon, reproducing in
clumsy, inefficient miniature the basic characteristics
of its outline, but it also is identical hi the process of
its making.

Imagining it hi cross-section, we find its sides
leading down by successive precipices to broad inter
mediate sloping surfaces. We find upon these broad
surfaces enormous mesas and lofty, ornately carved
edifices of rock which the floods have left standing.
We find in its middle, winding snakelike from side to
side, the narrow gorge of the river.

The parallel goes further. It is not at all neces
sary to conceive that either the wayside ditch or the
Grand Canyon was once brimful of madly dashing
waters. On the contrary, neither may ever have held
much greater streams than they hold to-day. In both
cases the power of the stream has been applied to
downward trenching; the greater spreading sides were
cut by the erosion of countless side streamlets re
sulting temporarily from periods of melting snow or of
local rainfall. It was these streamlets which cut the
side canyons and left standing between them the bold
promontories of the rim. It was these streamlets,

334 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

working from the surface, which separated portions of
these promontories from the plateau and turned them
into isolated mesas. It was the erosion of these mesas
which turned many of them into the gigantic and
fantastic temples and towers which rise from the
canyon's bowl.

Standing upon the rim and overlooking miles of
these successive precipices and intermediate templed
levels, we see the dark gorge of the granite trench,
and, deep within it, wherever its windings permit a
view of its bottom, a narrow ribbon of brown river.
This is the Colorado — a rill; but when we have de
scended six thousand feet of altitude to its edge we
find it a rushing turbulent torrent of muddy water.
Its average width is three hundred feet; its average
depth thirty feet. It is industriously digging the Grand
Canyon still deeper, and perhaps as rapidly as it ever
dug since it entered the granite.

Developing the thought in greater detail, let us
glance at the illustrations of this chapter and at any
photographs which may be at hand, and realization
will begin. Let imagination dart back a million years
or more to the time when this foreground rim and that
far run across the vast chasm are one continuous plain;
perhaps it is a pine forest, with the river, no greater
than to-day, perhaps not so great, winding through it
close to the surface level. As the river cuts downward,
the spring floods following the winter snows cave in
its banks here and there, forming sharply slanted
valleys which enclose promontories between them.

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 335

Spring succeeds spring, and these side valleys deepen
and eat backward while the promontories lengthen and
grow. The harder strata resist the disintegration of
alternate heat and cold, and, while always receding,
hold their form as cliffs; the softer strata between
the cliffs crumbles and the waste of spring waters
spreads them out in long flattened slopes. The cen
turies pass. The ruin buries itself deep in the soft
sandstone. The side valleys work miles back into the
pine forest. Each valley acquires its own system of
erosion; into each, from either side, enter smaller
valleys which themselves are eating backward into the
promontories.

The great valley of the Colorado now has broad
converging cliff-broken sides. Here and there these
indentations meet far in the background behind the
promontories, isolating island-like mesas.

The rest of the story is simple repetition. Imagine
enough thousands of centuries and you will imagine
the Grand Canyon. Those myriad temples and cas
tles and barbaric shrines are all that the rains and
melting snows have left of noble mesas, some of which,
when originally isolated, enclosed, as the marble en
closes the future statue, scores of the lesser but mighty
structures which compose the wonder city of the depths.

These architectural operations of Nature may be
seen to-day in midway stages. Find on the map the
Powell Plateau in the northwest of the canyon. Once
it was continuous with the rim, a noble promontory.
It was cut out from the rim perhaps within the exist-

336 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ence of the human race. A few hundred thousand
years from now it will be one or more Aladdin pal
aces.

Find on the map the great Walhalla Plateau in
the east of the canyon. Note that its base is nearly
separated from the parental rim; a thousand centuries
or so and its isolation will be complete. Not long
after that, as geologists reckon length of time, it will
divide into two plateaus; it is easy to pick the place
of division. The tourist of a million years hence will
see, where now it stands, a hundred glowing castles.

Let us look again at our photographs, which now
we can see with understanding. To realize the spec
tacle of the canyon, let imagination paint these strata
their brilliant colors. It will not be difficult; but here
again we must understand.

It is well to recall that these strata were laid in the
sea, and that they hardened into stone when the earth's
skin was pushed thousands of feet in air. Originally
they were the washings of distant highlands brought
down by rivers; the coloring of the shales and sand
stones is that of the parent rock modified, no doubt,
by chemical action in sea-water. The limestone,
product of the sea, is gray.

As these differently colored strata were once con
tinuous across the canyon, it follows that their se
quence is practically identical on both sides of the can
yon. That the colors seem confused is because, view
ing the spectacle from an elevation, we see the enormous
indentations of the opposite rim in broken and dis-

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 337

organized perspective. Few minds are patient and
orderly enough to fully disentangle the kaleidoscopic
disarray, but, if we can identify the strata by form
as well as color, we can at least comprehend without
trouble our principal outline; and comprehension is
the broad highway to appreciation.

To identify these strata, it is necessary to call them
by name. The names that geologists have assigned
them have no scientific significance other than iden
tity; they are Indian and local.

Beginning at the canyon run we have a stalwart
cliff of gray limestone known as the Kaibab Limestone,
or, conversationally, the Kaibab; it is about seven
hundred feet thick. Of this product of a million years
of microscopic life and death on sea-bottoms is formed
the splendid south-rim cliffs from which we view the
chasm. Across the canyon it is always recognizable
as the rim.

Below the talus of the Kaibab is the Coconino
sandstone, light yellowish-gray, coarse of grain, the
product of swift currents of untold thousands of cen
turies ago. This stratum makes a fine bright cliff
usually about four hundred feet in thickness, an effec
tive roofing for the glowing reds of the depths.

Immediately below the Coconino are the splendid
red shales and sandstones known as the Supai forma
tion. These lie in many strata of varying shades,
qualities, and thicknesses, but all, seen across the can
yon, merging into a single enormous horizontal body
of gorgeous red. The Supai measures eleven hundred

338 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

feet in perpendicular thickness, but as it is usually
seen in slopes which sometimes are long and gentle,
it presents to the eye a surface several times as broad.
This is the most prominent single mass of color in the
canyon, for not only does it form the broadest feature
of the opposite wall and of the enormous promontories
which jut therefrom, but the main bodies of Buddha,
Zoroaster, and many others of the fantastic temples
which rise from the floor.

Below the Supai, a perpendicular wall of intense
red five hundred feet high forces its personality upon
every foot of the canyon's vast length. This is the
famous Redwall, a gray limestone stained crimson
with the drip of Supai dye from above. Harder than
the sloping sandstone above and the shale below, it
pushes aggressively into the picture, squared, per
pendicular, glowing. It winds in and out of every bay
and gulf, and fronts precipitously every flaring prom
ontory. It roofs with overhanging eaves many a noble
palace and turns many a towering monument into a
pagoda.

Next below in series is the Tonto, a deep, broad,
shallow slant of dull-green and yellow shale, which,
with the thin broad sandstone base on which it rests,
forms the floor of the outer canyon, the tessellated
pavement of the city of flame. Without the Tonto's
green the spectacle of the Grand Canyon would have
missed its contrast and its fulness.

Through this floor the Granite Gorge winds its
serpentine way, two thousand feet deep, dark with

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 339

shadows, shining in places where the river swings in
view.

These are the series of form and color. They
occur with great regularity except in several spots
deep in the canyon where small patches of gleaming
quartzites and brilliant red shales show against the
dark granite; the largest of these lies in the depths
directly opposite El Tovar. These rocks are all that
one sees of ancient Algonkian strata which once over
lay the granite to a depth of thirteen thousand feet —
more than twice the present total depth of the canyon.
The erosion of many thousands of centuries wore them
away before the rocks that now compose the floor,
the temples and the precipiced walls of the great can
yon were even deposited in the sea as sand and lime
stone ooze, a fact that strikingly emphasizes the enor
mous age of this exhibit. Geologists speak of these
splashes of Algonkian rocks as the Unkar group,
another local Indian designation. There is also a sim
ilar Chuar group, which need not concern any except
those who make a close study of the canyon.

This is the picture. The imagination may realize
a fleet, vivid impression from the photograph. The
visitor upon the rim, outline in hand, may trace its
twisting elements in a few moments of attentive ob
servation, and thereafter enjoy his canyon as one only
enjoys a new city when he has mastered its scheme
and spirit, and can mentally classify its details as they
pass before him.

To one thus prepared, the Grand Canyon ceases

340 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

to be the brew-pot of chaotic emotion and becomes the
orderly revelation of Nature, the master craftsman
and the divine artist.

Ill

Entrance is from the south. The motor-road to
Grand View is available for most of the year. The
railroad to the El Tovar Hotel serves the year around,
for the Grand Canyon is an all-year resort. There
is a short winter of heavy snows on the rim, but
not in the canyon, which may be descended at all
seasons. Both routes terminate on the rim. Always
dramatic, the Grand Canyon welcomes the pilgrim in
the full panoply of its appalling glory. There is no
waiting in the anteroom, no sounding of trumpets,
no ceremony of presentation. He stands at once in
the presence.

Most visitors have bought tickets at home which
permit only one day's stay. The irrecoverable sen
sation of the first view is broken by the necessity for
an immediate decision upon how to spend that day,
for if one is to descend horseback to the river he must
engage his place and don his riding-clothes at once.
Under this stress the majority elect to remain on the
rim for reasons wholly apart from any question of
respective merit.

After all, if only one day is possible, it is the wise
decision. With the rim road, over which various drives
are scheduled, and several commanding points to whose
precipices one may walk, it will be a day to remember

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 341

for a lifetime. One should not attempt too much in
this one day. It is enough to sit in the presence of the
spectacle. Fortunate is he who may stay another
day and descend the trail into the streets of this vast
city; many times fortunate he who may live a little
amid its glories.

Because of this general habit of " seeing " the Grand
Canyon between sunrise and sunset, the admirable
hotel accommodations are not extensive, but sufficient.
There are cottage accommodations also at cheaper
rates. Hotels and cottages are well patronized sum
mer and winter. Upon the rim are unique rest-
houses, in one of which is a high-power telescope.
There is a memorial altar to John Wesley Powell, the
first explorer of the canyon. There is an excellent re
production of a Hopi house. There is an Indian camp.
The day's wanderer upon the rim will not lack enter
tainment when his eyes turn for rest from the chasm.

From the hotel, coaches make regular trips daily
to various view-points. Hopi Point, Mohave Point,
Yavapai Point, and Grandeur Point may all be visited;
the run of eight miles along the famous Hermit Rim
Road permits brief stops at Hopi, Mohave, and Pima
Points. Automobiles also make regular runs to the
gorgeous spectacle from Grand View. Still more dis
tant points may be made in private or hired cars.
Navajo Point offers unequalled views up and down the
full length of the canyon, and an automobile-road will
bring the visitor within easy reach of Bass Camp near
Havasupai Point in the far west of the reservation.

342 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

Many one-day visitors take none of these stage
and automobile trips, contented to dream the hours
away upon Yavapai or Hopi Points near by. After
all, it is just as well. A single view-point cannot be
mastered in one's first day, so what's the use of others?
On the other hand, seeing the same view from different
view-points miles apart will enrich and elaborate it.
Besides, one should see many views in order to acquire
some conception, however small, of the intricacy and
grandeur of the canyon. Besides, these trips help to
rest the eyes and mind. It is hard indeed to advise
the unlucky one-day visitor. It is as if a dyspeptic
should lead you to an elaborate banquet of a dozen
courses, and say: "I have permission to eat three
bites. Please help me choose them."

Wherever he stands upon the run the appalling
silence hushes the voice to whispers. No cathedral
imposes stillness so complete. It is sacrilege to speak,
almost to move. And yet the Grand Canyon is a
moving picture. It changes every moment. Always
shadows are disappearing here, appearing there; short
ening here, lengthening there. With every passing
hour it becomes a different thing. It is a sun-dial of
monumental size.

In the early morning the light streams down the
canyon from the east. Certain promontories shoot
miles into the picture, gleaming in vivid color, backed
by dark shadows. Certain palaces and temples stand
in magnificent relief. The inner gorge is brilliantly
outlined in certain places. As the day advances these

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 343

prominences shift positions; some fade; some disap
pear; still others spring into view.

As midday approaches the shadows fade; the
promontories flatten; the towering edifices move
bodily backward and merge themselves in the opposite
rim. There is a period of several hours when the
whole canyon has become a solid wall; strata fail to
match; eye and mind become confused; comprehen
sion is baffled by the tangle of disconnected bands of
color; the watcher is distressed by an oppressive sense
of helplessness.

It is when afternoon is well advanced that the
magician sun begins his most astonishing miracles in
the canyon's depths. Out from the blazing wall, one
by one, step the mighty obelisks and palaces, defined
by ever-changing shadows. Unsuspected promonto
ries emerge, undreamed-of gulfs sink back in the per
spective. The serpentine gorge appears here, fades
there, seems almost to move in the slow-changing
shadows. I shall not try even to suggest the soul-
uplifting spectacle which culminates in sunset.

Days may be spent upon the rim in many forms
of pleasure; short camping trips may be made to dis
tant points.

The descent into the canyon is usually made from
El Tovar down the Bright Angel Trail, so called be
cause it faces the splendid Bright Angel Canyon of the
north side, and by the newer Hermit Trail which starts
a few miles west. There are trails at Grand View,
eight miles east, and at Bass Camp, twenty-four miles

344 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

west of El Tovar, which are seldom used now. All
go to the bottom of the Granite Gorge. The com
monly used trails may be travelled afoot by those
physically able, and on mule-back by any person of any
age who enjoys ordinary health. The Bright Angel
trip returns the traveller to the rim at day's end. The
Hermit Trail trip camps him overnight on the floor of
the canyon at the base of a magic temple. The finest
trip of all takes him down the Hermit Trail, gives him
a night in the depths, and returns him to the rim by the
Bright Angel Trail. Powell named Bright Angel Creek
during that memorable first passage through the Can
yon. He had just named a muddy creek Dirty Devil,
which suggested, by contrast, the name of Bright
Angel for a stream so pure and sparkling.

The Havasupai Indian reservation may be visited
in the depths of Cataract Canyon by following the trail
from Bass Camp.

The first experience usually noted in the descent
is the fine quality of the trail, gentle in slope and
bordered by rock on the steep side. The next experi
ence is the disappearance of the straight uncompro
mising horizon of the opposite rim, which is a distinc
tive feature of every view from above. As soon as the
descent fairly begins, even the smaller bluffs and prom
ontories assume towering proportions, and, from the
Tonto floor, the mighty elevations of Cheops, Isis,
Zoroaster, Shiva, Wotan, and the countless other
temples of the abyss become mountains of enormous
height.

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 345

From the river's side the elevations of the Granite
Gorge present a new series of precipitous towers, back
of which in places loom the tops of the painted palaces,
and back of them, from occasional favored view-spots,
the far-distant rim. Here, and here only, does the
Grand Canyon reveal the fulness of its meaning.

The Grand Canyon was discovered in 1540 by
El Tovar, one of the captains of Cardenas, in charge
of one of the expeditions of the Spanish explorer,
Diaz, who was hunting for seven fabled cities of vast
wealth. "They reached the banks of a river which
seemed to be more than three or four leagues above
the stream that flowed between them." It was seen
in 1776 by a Spanish priest who sought a crossing and
found one at a point far above the canyon; this still
bears the name Vado de los Padres.

By 1840 it was probably known to the trappers
who overran the country. In 1850 Lieutenant Whip-
pie, surveying for a Pacific route, explored the Black
Canyon and ascended the Grand Canyon to Diamond
Creek.

In 1857 Lieutenant Ives, sent by the War Depart
ment to test the navigability of the Colorado, ascended
as far as the Virgin River in a steamboat which he had
shipped in pieces from Philadelphia. From there he en
tered the Grand Canyon afoot, climbed to the rim, and,
making a detour, encountered the river again higher

346 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

up. In 1867 James White was picked up below the
Virgin River lashed to floating logs. He said that his
hunting-party near the head of the Colorado River,
attacked by Indians, had escaped upon a raft. This
presently broke up in the rapids and his companions
were lost. He lashed himself to the wreckage and was
washed through the Grand Canyon.

About this time Major John Wesley Powell, a
school-teacher who had lost an arm in the Civil War,
determined to explore the great canyons of the Green
and Colorado Rivers. Besides the immense benefit
to science, the expedition promised a great adventure.
Many lives had been lost in these canyons and wonder
ful were the tales told concerning them. Indians re
ported that huge cataracts were hidden in their depths
and that in one place the river swept through an un
derground passage.

Nevertheless, with the financial backing of the
State institutions of Illinois and the Chicago Academy
of Science, Powell got together a party of ten men
with four open boats, provisions for ten months, and
all necessary scientific instruments. He started above
the canyons of the Green River on May 24, 1869.

There are many canyons on the Green and Colo
rado Rivers. They vary in length from eight to a
hundred and fifty miles, with walls successively rising
from thirteen hundred to thirty-five hundred feet in
height. The climax of all, the Grand Canyon, is two
hundred and seventeen miles long, with walls six
thousand feet in height.

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 347

On August 17, when Powell and his adventurers
reached the Grand Canyon, their rations had been
reduced by upsets and other accidents to enough musty
flour for ten days, plenty of coffee, and a few dried,
apples. The bacon had spoiled. Most of the scientific
instruments were in the bottom of the river. One
boat was destroyed. The men were wet to the skin
and unable to make a fire. In this plight they entered
the Grand Canyon, somewhere in whose depths a
great cataract had been reported.

The story of the passage is too long to tell here.
Chilled, hungry, and worn, they struggled through it.
Often they were obliged to let their boats down steep
rapids by ropes, and clamber after them along the
slippery precipices. Often there was nothing to do
but to climb into their boats and run down long foam
ing slants around the corners of which death, perhaps,
awaited. Many times they were upset and barely
escaped with their lives. With no wraps or clothing
that were not soaked with water, there were nights
when they could not sleep for the cold.

So the days passed and the food lessened to a few
handfuls of wet flour. The dangers increased; some
falls were twenty feet in height. Finally three of the
men determined to desert; they believed they could
climb the walls and that their chances would be
better with the Indians than with the canyon. Powell
endeavored to dissuade them, but they were firm.
He offered to divide his flour with them, but this they
refused.

348 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

These men, two Rowlands, brothers, and William
Dunn, climbed the canyon walls and were killed by
Indians. Two or three days later Powell and the rest
of his party emerged below the Grand Canyon, where
they found food and safety.

Taught by the experience of this great adventure,
Powell made a second trip two years later which was
a scientific achievement. Later on he became Director
of the United States Geological Survey.

Since then, the passage of the Grand Canyon has
been made several times. R. B. Stanton made it in
1889 in the course of a survey for a proposed railroad
through the canyon; one of the leaders of the party
was drowned.

The history of the Grand Canyon has been in
dustriously collected. It remains for others to gather
the legends. It is enough here to quote from Powell
the Indian story of its origin.

"Long ago," he writes, "there was a great and
wise chief who mourned the death of his wife, and
would not be comforted until Tavwoats, one of the
Indian gods, came to him and told him his wife was in
a happier land, and offered to take him there that he
might see for himself, if, upon his return, he would cease
to mourn. The great chief promised. Then Tav
woats made a trail through the mountains that inter
vene between that beautiful land, the balmy region
of the great West, and this, the desert home of the

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 349

poor Numa. This trail was the canyon gorge of the
Colorado. Through it he led him; and when they
had returned the deity exacted from the chief a promise
that he would tell no one of the trail. Then he rolled
a river into the gorge, a mad, raging stream, that should
engulf any that might attempt to enter thereby."

The bill creating the Grand Canyon National
Park passed Congress early in 1919, and was signed
by President Wilson on February 26. This closed
an intermittent campaign of thirty-three years, be
gun by President Harrison, then senator from In
diana, in January, 1886, to make a national park of
the most stupendous natural spectacle in the world.
Politics, private interests, and the deliberation of
governmental procedure were the causes of delay. A
self-evident proposition from the beginning, it illus
trates the enormous difficulties which confront those
who labor to develop our national-parks system. The
story is worth the telling.

Senator Harrison's bill of 1886 met an instant
response from the whole nation. It called for a na
tional park fifty-six miles long and sixty-nine miles
wide. There was opposition from Arizona and the
bill failed. In 1893 the Grand Canyon National For
est was created. In 1898, depredations and unlawful
seizures of land having been reported, the Secretary
of the Interior directed the Land-Office to prepare a

350 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

new national-park bill. In 1899 the Land-Office re
ported that the bill could not be drawn until the region
was surveyed. It took the Geological Survey five
years to make the survey. The bill was not prepared
because meantime it was discovered that the Atlantic
and Pacific Railroad, now the Santa Fe, owned rights
which first must be eliminated.

Failing to become a national park, President Roose
velt proclaimed the Grand Canyon a national monu
ment in 1908. In 1909 a bill was introduced entitling
Ralph H. Cameron to build a scenic railway along the
canyon rim, which created much adverse criticism
and failed. In 1910 the American Scenic and His
toric Preservation Society proposed a bill to create
the Grand Canyon a national park of large size. The
Geological Survey, to which it was referred, recom
mended a much smaller area. By the direction of
President Taft, Senator Flint introduced a national-
park bill which differed from both suggestions. The
opposition of grazing interests threw it into the hands
of conferees. In 1911 Senator Flint introduced the
conferees' bill, but it was opposed by private interests
and failed.

Meantime the country became aroused. Patri
otic societies petitioned for a national park, and the
National Federation of Women's Clubs began an agi
tation. The Department of the Interior prepared a
map upon which to base a bill, and for several years
negotiated with the Forest Service, which administered
the Grand Canyon as a national monument, concern-

A PAGEANT OF CREATION 351

ing boundaries. Finally the boundaries were reduced
to little more than the actual rim of the canyon, and
a bill was prepared which Senator Ashurst introduced
in February, 1917. It failed in committee in the
House owing to opposition from Arizona. It was the
same bill, again introduced by Senator Ashurst in the
new Congress two months later, which finally passed
the House and became a law in 1919; but it required
a favoring resolution by the Arizona legislature to
pave the way.

Meantime many schemes were launched to utilize
the Grand Canyon for private gain. It was plastered
thickly with mining claims, though the Geological
Survey showed that it contained no minerals worth
mining; mining claims helped delay. Schemers sought
capital to utilize its waters for power. Railroads were
projected. Plans were drawn to run sightseeing cars
across it on wire cables. These were the interests,
and many others, which opposed the national park.

XVII

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT

ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT, SOUTHERN UTAH. AREA, 120
SQUARE MILES

WHEN, in the seventies, Major J. W. Powell,
the daring adventurer of the Grand Canyon,
faced Salt Lake City on his return from one of his
notable geological explorations of the southwest, he
laid his course by a temple of rock " lifting its opal
escent shoulders against the eastern sky." His party
first sighted it across seventy miles of a desert which
"rose in a series of Cyclopean steps." When, climb
ing these, they had seen the West Temple of the Virgin
revealed in the glory of vermilion body and shining
white dome, and had gazed between the glowing Gates
of Little Zion into the gorgeous valley within, these
scenery-sated veterans of the Grand Canyon and the
Painted Desert passed homeward profoundly impressed
and planning quick return.

No wonder that Brigham Young, who had visited
it many years before with a party of Mormons seek
ing a refuge in event of Indian raids or of exile from
their Zion, Salt Lake City, had looked upon its glory
as prophetic, and named it Little Zion.

Geologists found the spot a fruitful field of study.
They found it also a masterpiece of desert beauty.

352

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 353

"Again we are impressed with the marvellous
beauty of outline, the infinite complication of these
titanic buttes," wrote F. S. Dellenbaugh, topographer
of the Powell party, on his second visit. "It is doubt
ful if in this respect the valley has its equal. Not
even the Grand Canyon offers a more varied spectacle;
yet all is welded together in a superb ensemble. "

"Nothing can exceed the wondrous beauty of
Little Zion Canyon," wrote C. E. Button. "In its
proportions it is about equal to Yosemite, but in the
nobility and beauty of its sculptures there is no com
parison. It is Hyperion to a Satyr. No wonder the
fierce Mormon zealot who named it was reminded of
the Great Zion on which his fervid thoughts were
bent, of 'houses not built with hands, eternal in the
heavens."'

And Doctor G. K. Gilbert, whose intimate study
of its recesses has become a geological classic, declared
it "the most wonderful defile" that it had been even
his experienced fortune to behold.

Technical literature contains other outbursts of
enthusiastic admiration, some of eloquence, hidden,
however, among pages so incomprehensible to the
average lover of the sublime in Nature that the glory
of Little Zion was lost in its very discovery. So remote
did it lie from the usual lines of travel and traffic that,
though its importance resulted in its conservation as a
national monument in 1909, it was six or seven years
more before its fame as a spectacle of the first order
began to get about. The tales of adventurous explor-

Top of Plateau

354 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ers, as usual, were discounted. It was not until agen
cies seeking new tourist attractions sent parties to
verify reports that the public gaze was centred upon
the canyon's supreme loveliness.

To picture Zion one must recall that the great
plateau in which the Virgin
River has sunk these can
yons was once enormously
higher than now. The ero
sion of hundreds of thou
sands, or, if you please, mil
lions of years, has cut down
and still is cutting down the
plateau. These " Cyclopean
steps," each step the thick
ness of a stratum or a series
of strata of hardened sands,
mark progressive stages in
the decomposition of the
whole.

Little Zion Canyon is an
early stage in Nature's pro
cess of levelling still another
sandstone step, that is all;

this one fortunately of many gorgeous hues. From
the top of this layer we may look down thousands
of vertical feet into the painted canyon whose river
still is sweeping out the sands that Nature chisels
from the cliffs; or from the canyon's bottom we may
look up thousands of feet to the cliffed and serrated

Virgin P.

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 355

top of the doomed plateau. These ornate precipices
were carved by trickling water and tireless winds.
These fluted and towered temples of master decoration
were disclosed when watery chisels cut away the sands
that formerly had merged them with the ancient rock,
just as the Lion of Lucerne was disclosed for the joy
of the world when Thorwaldsen's chisel chipped away
the Alpine rock surrounding its unformed image.

The colors are even more extraordinary than the
forms. The celebrated Vermilion Cliff, which for
more than a hundred miles streaks the desert landscape
with vivid red, here combines spectacularly with the
White Cliff, another famous desert feature — two thou
sand feet of the red surmounted by a thousand feet of
the white. These constitute the body of color.

But there are other colors. The Vermilion Cliff
rests upon the so-called Painted Desert stratum, three
hundred and fifty feet of a more insistent red relieved
by mauve and purple shale. That in turn rests upon
a hundred feet of brown conglomerate streaked with
gray, the grave of reptiles whose bones have survived
a million years or more. And that rests upon the
greens and grays and yellows of the Belted Shales.

Nor is this all, for far in the air above the wonder
ful White Cliff rise in places six hundred feet of drab
shales and chocolate limestones intermixed with crim
sons whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical streaks
across the glistening white. And even above that, in
places, lie remnants of the mottled, many-colored beds
of St. Elmo shales and limestones in whose embrace,

356 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

a few hundred miles away, lie embedded the bones of
many monster dinosaurs of ages upon ages ago.

Through these successive layers of sands and
shales and limestones, the deposits of a million years
of earth's evolution, colored like a Roman sash, glow
ing in the sun like a rainbow, the Virgin River has cut
a vertical section, and out of its sides the rains of cen
turies of centuries have detached monster monoliths
and temples of marvellous size and fantastic shape,
upon whose many-angled surfaces water and wind
have sculptured ten thousand fanciful designs and
decorations.

The way in to this desert masterpiece of southern
Utah is a hundred miles of progressive preparation.
From railroad to canyon there is not an unuseful mile
or hour. It is as if all were planned, step by step, to
make ready the mind of the traveller to receive the
revelation with fullest comprehension.

To one approaching who does not know the desert,
the motion-picture on the screen of the car-window is
exciting in its mystery. These vast arid bottom
lands of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, girded by moun
tain groups and ranges as arid as the sands from which
they lift their tawny sides, provoke suggestive ques
tions of the past.

In this receptive mood the traveller reaches Lund
and an automobile. The ride to Cedar City, where he
spends the night, shows him the sage-dotted desert at
close range. His horizon is one of bare, rugged moun
tains. In front of him rise the " Cyclopean steps" in

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THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 357

long, irregular, deeply indented sweeps. The vivid
Pink Cliff, which, had it not long since been washed
away from Little Zion, would have added another tier
of color to its top, here, on the desert, remains a dis
tant horizon. The road climbs Lake Bonneville's
southern shore, and, at Cedar City, reaches the glorified
sandstones.

From Cedar City to the canyon one sweeps through
Mormon settlements founded more than sixty years
ago, a region of stream-watered valleys known of old
as Dixie. The road is part of the Arrowhead Trail,
once in fact a historic trail, now a motor-highway
between Salt Lake and Los Angeles. The valleys
bloom. Pomegranates, figs, peaches, apricots, melons,
walnuts, and almonds reach a rare perfection. Cot
ton, which Brigham Young started here as an experi
ment in 1861, is still grown. Lusty cottonwood-trees
line the banks of the little rivers. Cedars dot the val
leys and cover thickly the lower hills. And everywhere,
on every side, the arid cliffs close in. The Pink Cliff
has been left behind, but the Vermilion Cliff constantly
appears. The White Cliff enters and stays. Long
stretches of road overlie one and another colored
stratum; presently the ground is prevailingly red,
with here and there reaches of mauve, yellow, green,
and pink.

Cedar City proves to be a quaint, straggling Mor
mon village with a touch of modern enterprise; south
of Cedar City the villages lack the enterprise. The
houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and

358 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

many of them are half a century old and more.
Dilapidated square forts, reminders of pioneer strug
gles with the Indians, are seen here and there. Com
pact Mormon churches are in every settlement, how
ever small. The men are bearded, coatless, and wear
baggy trousers, suggestive of Holland. Bronzed and
deliberate women, who drive teams and work the fields
with the men, wear old-fashioned sunbonnets. Many
of these people have never seen a railroad-train. News
papers are scarce and long past date. Here Mor-
monism of the older fashion is a living religion, affect
ing the routine of daily life.

Dixie is a land of plenty, but it is a foreign land.
It is reminiscent, with many differences, of an Algerian
oasis. The traveller is immensely interested. Some
how these strange primitive villages, these simple,
earnest, God-fearing people, merge into unreality with
the desert, the sage-dotted mountains, the cedar-
covered slopes, the blooming valleys, the colored sands,
and the vivid cliffs.

Through Bellevue, Toquerville, the ruins of Vir
gin City, Rockville, and finally to Springdale winds
the road. Meantime the traveller has speeded south
under the Hurricane Cliff, which is the ragged edge
left when all the land west of it sank two thousand feet
during some geologic time long past. He reaches the
Virgin River where it emerges from the great cliffs in
whose recesses it is born, and whence it carries in its
broad muddy surge the products of their steady dis
integration.

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 359

From here on, swinging easterly up-stream, sen
sation hastens to its climax. Here the Hurricane
Cliff sends aloft an impressive butte painted in slanting
colors and capped with black basalt. Farther on a
rugged promontory striped with vivid tints pushes out
from the southern wall nearly to the river's brink.
The cliffs on both sides of the river are carved from
the stratum which geologists call the Belted Shales.
Greenish-grays, brownish-yellows, many shades of
bright red, are prominent; it is hard to name a color
or shade which is not represented in its horizontal
bands. "The eye tires and the mind flags in their
presence," writes Professor Willis T. Lee. "To try to
realize in an hour's time the beauty and variety of detail
here presented is as useless as to try to grasp the
thoughts expressed in whole rows of volumes by walk
ing through a library."

Far up the canyon which North Creek pushes
through this banded cliff, two towering cones of glis
tening white are well named Guardian Angels — of the
stream which roars between their feet. Eagle Crag,
which Moran painted, looms into view. On the south
appears the majestic massing of needle-pointed towers
which Powell named the Pinnacles of the Virgin.
The spectacular confuses with its brilliant variations.

At the confluence of the Virgin River and its
North Fork, known of old as the Parunuweap and the
Mukuntuweap, the road sweeps northward up the
Mukuntuweap. There have been differing reports of
the meaning of this word, which gave the original name

360 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

to the national monument. It has been popularly ac
cepted as meaning "Land of God, " but John R. Wallis,
of St. George, Utah, has traced it to its original Indian
source. Mukuntuweap, he writes, means "Land of the
Springs," and Parunuweap "Land of the Birds."

Reaching Springdale, at the base of the Vermilion
Cliff, the traveller looks up-stream to the valley mouth
through which the river emerges from the cliffs, and
a spectacle without parallel meets his eye. Left of the
gorgeous entrance rises the unbelievable West Temple
of the Virgin, and, merging with it from behind, loom
the lofty Towers of the Virgin. Opposite these, and
back from the canyon's eastern brink, rises the loftier
and even more majestic East Temple of the Virgin.
Between them he sees a perspective of red and white
walls, domes, and uinnacles which thrills him with
expectation.

And so, fully prepared in mind and spirit, awed
and exultant, he enters Zion.

Few natural objects which have been described
so seldom have provoked such extravagant praise as
the West Temple. It is seen from a foreground of
gliding river, cotton-wood groves, and talus slopes
dotted with manzanita, sage, cedars, and blooming
cactus. From a stairway of mingled yellows, reds,
grays, mauves, purples, and chocolate brown, it springs
abruptly four thousand feet. Its body is a brilliant
red. Its upper third is white. It has the mass and
proportions, the dignity and grandeur, of a cathedral.
It is supremely difficult to realize that it was not de-

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 361

signed, so true to human conception are the upright
form and mass of its central structure, the proportion
ing and modelling of its extensive wings and buttresses.
On top of the lofty central rectangle rests, above its
glistening white, a low squared cap of deepest red.
It is a temple in the full as well as the noblest sense of
the word.

The East Temple, which rises directly opposite
and two miles back from the rim, is a fitting companion.
It is a thousand feet higher. Its central structure is a
steep truncated cone capped like the West Temple.
Its wings are separated half-way down, one an elon
gated pyramid and the other a true cone, both of mag
nificent size and bulk but truly proportioned to the
central mass. Phrase does not convey the suggestion
of architectural calculation in both of these stupen
dous monuments. One can easily believe that the Mor
mon prophet in naming them saw them the designed
creations of a personal deity.

A more definite conception of Nature's gigantic
processes follows upon realization that these lofty
structures once joined across the canyon, stratum for
stratum, color for color. The rock that joined them,
disintegrated by the frosts and rains, has passed down
the muddy current of the Virgin, down the surging
tide of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, and
into the Pacific. Some part of these sands doubtless
helped to build the peninsula of Lower California.

Passing the gates the traveller stands in a trench
of nearly perpendicular sides more than half a mile

362 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

deep, half a mile wide at the bottom, a mile wide from
crest to crest. The proportions and measurements
suggest Yosemite, but there is little else in common.
These walls blaze with color. On the west the Streaked
Wall, carved from the White Cliff, is stained with the
drip from the red and drab and chocolate shales and
limestones not yet wholly washed from its top. It is
a vivid thing, wonderfully eroded. Opposite is the
Brown Wall, rich in hue, supporting three stupendous
structures of gorgeous color, two of which are known
as the Mountain of the Sun and the Watchman. To
gether they are the Sentinels. Passing these across a
plaza apparently broadened for their better presenta
tion rise on the west the Three Patriarchs, Yosemite-
like in form, height, and bulk, but not in personality
or color. The brilliance of this wonder-spot passes
description.

Here the canyon contracts, and we come to the
comfortable hotel-camp, terminal of the automobile
journey. It is on the river side in a shady alcove of
the east wall near a spring. Here horses may be had
for exploration.

A mile above the camp stands one of the most
remarkable monoliths of the region. El Gobernador
is a colossal truncated dome, red below and white
above. The white crown is heavily marked in two
directions, suggesting the web and woof of drapery.
Directly opposite, a lesser monolith, nevertheless gi
gantic, is suggestively if sentimentally called Angel's
Landing. A natural bridge which is still in Nature's

From a photograph by Douglas White

EL GOBERNADOR, ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT

Three thousand feet high; the lower two thousand feet is a brilliant red. the upper thousand

feet is white

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 363

workshop is one of the Interesting spectacles of this
vicinity. Its splendid arch is fully formed, but the
wall against which it rests its full length remains,
broken through in one spot only. How many thou
sands or hundreds of thousands of years will be re
quired to wipe away the wall and leave the bridge
complete is for those to guess who will.

Here also is the valley end of a wire cable which
passes upward twenty-five hundred feet to cross a
break in the wall to a forest on the mesa's top. Lum
ber is Dixie's most hardly furnished need. For years
sawn timbers have been cabled down into the valley
and carted to the villages of the Virgin River.

In some respects the most fascinating part of
Little Zion is still beyond. A mile above El Gober-
nador the river swings sharply west and doubles on
itself. Raspberry Bend is far nobler than its name
implies, and the Great Organ which the river here en
circles exacts no imaginative effort. Beyond this the
canyon narrows rapidly. The road has long since
stopped, and soon the trail stops. Presently the river,
now a shrunken stream, concealing occasional quick
sands, offers the only footing. The walls are no less
lofty, no less richly colored, and the weary traveller
works his difficult way forward.

There will come a time if he persists when he may
stand at the bottom of a chasm more than two thou
sand feet deep and, nearly touching the walls on either
side, look up and see no sky.

"At the water's edge the walls are perpendicular,"

364 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

writes Doctor G. K. Gilbert, of the U. S. Geological
Survey, who first described it, "but in the deeper parts
they open out toward the top. As we entered and
found our outlook of sky contracted — as we had never
before seen it between canyon cliffs — I measured the
aperture above, and found it thirty-five degrees. We
had thought this a minimum, but soon discovered our
error. Nearer and nearer the walls approached, and
our strip of blue narrowed down to twenty degrees,
then ten, and at last was even intercepted .by the
overhanging rocks. There was, perhaps, no point
from which, neither forward nor backward, could we
discover a patch of sky, but many times our upward
view was completely cut off by the interlocking of the
walls, which, remaining nearly parallel to each other,
warped in and out as they ascended."

Here he surprises the secret of the making of Zion.

"As a monument of denudation, this chasm is an
example of downward erosion by sand-bearing water.
The principle on which the cutting depends is almost
identical with that of the marble saw, but the sand
grains, instead of being embedded in rigid iron, are
carried by a flexible stream of water. By gravity they
have been held against the bottom of the cut, so that
they should make it vertical, but the current has car
ried them, in places, against one side or the other,
and so far modified the influence of gravity that the
cut undulates somewhat in its vertical section, as well
as in its horizon tal."

This, then, is how Nature began, on the original

From a photograph by the U. S. Geological Survey

ZION CANYON FROM THE RIM

THE THREE PATRIARCHS, ZION CANYON

These red-and-white structures rise more than two thousand feet above the canyon floor

THE RAINBOW OF THE DESERT 365

surface of the plateau, perhaps with the output of a
spring shower, to dig this whole mighty spectacle for
our enjoyment to-day. We may go further. We may
imagine the beginning of the titanic process that dug
the millions of millions of chasms, big and little, con
tributing to the mighty Colorado, that dug the Grand
Canyon itself, that reduced to the glorified thing it now
is the enormous plateau of our great southwest, which
would have been many thousands of feet higher
than the highest pinnacle of Little Zion had not erosion
more than counteracted the uplifting of the plateau.

Little else need be said to complete this picture.
The rains and melting snows of early spring produce
mesa- top torrents which pour into the valley and hasten
for a period the processes of decorating the walls and
levelling the plateau. So it happens that waterfalls
of power and beauty then enrich this wondrous spec
tacle. But this added beauty is not for the tourist,
who may come in comfort only after its disappearance.

But springs are many. Trickling from various
levels in the walls, they develop new tributary gorges.
Gushing from the foundations, they create alcoves and
grottos which are in sharp contrast with their desert
environment, enriching by dampness the colors of the
sandstone and decorating these refreshment-places
with trailing ferns and flowering growths. In these
we see the origin of the Indian name, Mukuntuweap,
Land of the Springs.

The Indians, however, always stood in awe of
Little Zion. They entered it, but feared the night.

366 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

In 1918 President Wilson changed the name from
Mukuntuweap to Zion. At the same time he greatly
enlarged the reservation. Zion National Monument
now includes a large area of great and varied desert
magnificence, including the sources and canyons of
two other streams besides Mukuntuweap.

XVIII
HISTORIC MONUMENTS OF THE SOUTHWEST

ELEVEN national monuments in the States of
Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado illustrate
the history of our southwest from the times when pre
historic man dwelt in caves hollowed in desert preci
pices down through the Spanish fathers' centuries of
self-sacrifice and the Spanish explorers' romantic search
for the Quivira and the Seven Cities of Cibola.

The most striking feature of the absorbing story
of the Spanish occupation is its twofold inspiration.
Hand in hand the priest and the soldier boldly invaded
the desert. The passion of the priest was the saving
of souls, and the motive of the soldier was the greed
of gold. The priest deprecated the soldier; the soldier
despised the priest. Each used the other for the
realization of his own purposes. The zealous priest,
imposing his religion upon the shrinking Indian, did
not hesitate to invoke the soldier's aid for so holy a
purpose; the soldier used the gentle priest to cloak
the greedy business of wringing wealth from the frugal
native. Together, they hastened civilization.

Glancing for a moment still further back, the
rapacious hordes already had gutted the rich stores of
Central America and the northern regions of South
America. The rush of the lustful conqueror was as-

367

368 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

tonishingly swift. Columbus himself was as eager
for gold as he was zealous for religion. From the dis
covery of America scarcely twenty years elapsed be
fore Spanish armies were violently plundering the
Caribbean Islands, ruthlessly subjugating Mexico,
overrunning Venezuela, and eagerly seeking tidings of
the reputed wealth of Peru. The air was supercharged
with reports of treasure, and no reports were too wild
for belief; myths, big and little, ran amuck. El
Dorado, the gilded man of rumor, became the dream,
then the belief, of the times; presently a whole nation
was conceived clothed in dusted gold. The myth of
the Seven Cities of Cibola, each a city of vast treasure,
the growth of years of rumor, seems to have perfected
itself back home in Spain. The twice-born myth of
Quivira, city of gold, which cost thousands of lives and
hundreds of thousands of Spanish ducats, lives even
to-day in remote neighborhoods of the southwest.

Pizarro conquered Peru ini526; by 153 5, with the
south looted, Spanish eyes looked longingly north
ward. In 1539 Fray Marcos, a Franciscan, made a
reconnaissance from the Spanish settlements of Sonora
into Arizona with the particular purpose of locating
the seven cities. The following year Coronado, at his
own expense, made the most romantic exploration in
human history. Spanish expectation may be mea
sured by the cost of this and its accompanying expedi
tion by sea to the Gulf of California, the combined
equipment totalling a quarter million dollars of Ameri
can money of to-day. Coronado took two hundred and

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 369

sixty horsemen, sixty foot-soldiers, and more than a
thousand Indians. Besides his pack-animals he led a
thousand spare horses to carry home the loot.

He sought the seven cities in Arizona and New
Mexico, and found the pueblo of Zuni, prosperous but
lacking its expected hoard of gold; he crossed Colorado
in search of Quivira and found it in Kansas, a wretched
habitation of a shiftless tribe; their houses straw, he
reported, their clothes the hides of cows, meaning
bison. He entered Nebraska in search of the broad
river whose shores were lined with gold — the identical
year, curiously, in which De Soto discovered the Missis
sippi. Many were the pueblos he visited and many
his adventures and perils; but the only treasure he
brought back was his record of exploration.

This was the first of more than two centuries of
Spanish expeditions. Fifty years after Coronado, the
myth of Quivira was born again ; thereafter it wandered
homeless, the inspiration of constant search, and final
ly settled in the ruins of the ancient pueblo of Tabira,
or, as Bandelier has it, Teypana, New Mexico; the
myth of the seven cities never wholly perished.

It is not my purpose to follow the fascinating for
tunes of Spanish proselyting and conquest. I merely
set the stage for the tableaux of the national monu
ments.

370 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The Spaniards found our semiarid southwest
dotted thinly with the pueblos and its canyons hung
with the cliff-dwellings of a large and fairly prosperous
population of peace-loving Indians, who hunted the
deer and the antelope, fished the rivers, and dry-
farmed the mesas and valleys. Not so advanced in
the arts of civilization as the people of the Mesa Verde,
in Colorado, nevertheless their sense of form was pat
ent in their architecture, and their family life, govern
ment, and religion were highly organized. They were
worshippers of the sun. Each pueblo and outlying
village was a political unit.

Let us first consider those national monuments
which touch intimately the Spanish occupation.

GRAN QUIVIRA NATIONAL MONUMENT

Eighty miles southeast of Albuquerque, in the
hollow of towering desert ranges, lies the arid country
which Indian tradition calls the Accursed Lakes.
Here, at the points of a large triangle, sprawl the ruins
of three once flourishing pueblo cities, Abo, Cuaray,
and Tabira. Once, says tradition, streams flowed into
lakes inhabited by great fish, and the valleys bloomed;
it was an unfaithful wife who brought down the curse
of God.

When the Spaniards came these cities were at the
flood-tide of prosperity. Their combined population

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 371

was large. Tabira was chosen as the site of the mis
sion whose priests should trudge the long desert trails
and minister to all.

Undoubtedly, it was one of the most important of
the early Spanish missions. The greater of the two
churches was built of limestone, its outer walls six feet
thick. It was a hundred and forty feet long and
forty-eight feet wide. The present height of the walls
is twenty-five feet.

The ancient community building adjoining the
church, the main pueblo of Tabira, has the outlines
which are common to the prehistoric pueblos of the en
tire southwest and persist in general features in mod
ern Indian architecture. The rooms are twelve to
fifteen feet square, with ceilings eight or ten feet high.
Doors connect the rooms, and the stories, of which
there are three, are connected by ladders through trap
doors. It probably held a population of fifteen hun
dred. The pueblo has well stood the rack of time;
the lesser buildings outside it have been reduced to
mounds.

The people who built and inhabited these cities of
the Accursed Lakes were of the now extinct Piro stock.
The towns were discovered in 1581 by Francisco
Banchez de Chamuscado. The first priest assigned to
the field was Fray Francisco de San Miguel, this in
1 598. The mission of Tabira was founded by Francisco
de Acevedo about 1628. The smaller church was
built then; the great church was built in 1644, but
was never fully finished. Between 1670 and 1675 a^

372 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

three native cities and their Spanish churches were
wiped out by Apaches.

Charles F. Lummis, from whom some of these
historical facts are quoted, has been at great pains to
trace the wanderings of the Quivira myth. Bandelier
mentions an ancient New Mexican Indian called Tio
Juan Largo, who told a Spanish explorer about the
middle of the eighteenth century that Quivira was
Tabira. Otherwise history is silent concerning the
process by which the myth finally settled upon that
historic city, far indeed from its authentic home in
what now is Kansas. The fact stands, however, that
as late as the latter hah" of the eighteenth century the
name Tabira appeared on the official map of New Mex
ico. When and how this name was lost and the
famous ruined city with its Spanish churches accepted
as Gran Quivira perhaps never will be definitely known.

" Mid-ocean is not more lonesome than the plains,
nor night so gloomy as that dumb sunlight," wrote
Lummis in 1893, approaching the Gran Quivira across
the desert. "The brown grass is knee-deep, and even
this shock gives a surprise in this hoof -obliterated land.
The bands of antelope that drift, like cloud shadows,
across the dun landscape suggest less of life than of the
supernatural. The spell of the plains is a wondrous
thing. At first it fascinates. Then it bewilders. At
last it crushes. It is intangible but resistless; strong
er than hope, reason, will — stronger than humanity.
When one cannot otherwise escape the plains, one
takes refuge in madness."

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 373

This is the setting of the "ghost city" of "ashen
hues," that "wraith in pallid stone," the Gran Quivira.

EL MORRO NATIONAL MONUMENT

Due west from Albuquerque, New Mexico, not
far from the Arizona boundary, El Morro National
Monument conserves a mesa end of striking beauty
upon whose cliffs are graven many inscriptions cut in
passing by the Spanish and American explorers of
more than two centuries. It is a historical record of
unique value, the only extant memoranda of several
expeditions, an invaluable detail in the history of many.
It has helped trace obscure courses and has established
important departures. To the tourist it brings home,
as nothing else can, the realization of these grim ro
mances of other days.

El Morro, the castle, is also called Inscription
Rock. West of its steepled front, in the angle of a
sharp bend in the mesa, is a large partly enclosed
natural chamber, a refuge in storm. A spring here
betrays the reason for El Morro's popularity among
the explorers of a semidesert region. The old Zuni
trail bent from its course to touch this spring. In
scriptions are also found near the spring and on the
outer side of the mesa facing the Zuni Road.

For those acquainted with the story of Spanish
exploration this national monument will have unique
interest. To all it imparts a fascinating sense of the
romance of those early days with which the large body
of Americans have yet to become familiar. The pop-

374 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ular story of this romantic period of American history,
its poetry and its fiction remain to be written.

The oldest inscription is dated February 18, 1526.
The name of Juan de Onate, later founder of Santa
Fe, is there under date of 1606, the year of his visit
to the mouth of the Colorado River. One of the
latest Spanish inscriptions is that of Don Diego de
Vargas, who in 1692 reconquered the Indians who re
belled against Spanish authority in 1680.

The reservation also includes several important
community houses of great antiquity, one of which
perches safely upon the very top of El Morro rock.

CASA GRANDE NATIONAL MONUMENT

In the far south of Arizona not many miles north
of the boundary of Sonora, there stands, near the Gila
River, the noble ruin which the Spaniards call Casa
Grande, or Great House. It was a building of large
size situated in a compound of outlying buildings en
closed in a rectangular wall; no less than three other
similar compounds and four detached clan houses
once stood in the near neighborhood. Evidently, in
prehistoric days, this was an important centre of popu
lation; remains of an irrigation system are still visible.

The builders of these prosperous communal dwell
ings were probably Pima Indians. The Indians living
in the neighborhood to-day have traditions indicated
by their own names for the Casa Grande, the Old
House of the Chief and the Old House of Chief Morn
ing Green. "The Pima word for green and blue is the

CASA GRANDE NATIONAL MONUMJEN1

PREHISTORIC CAVE HOMES IN THE BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT

The holes worn by erosion have been enlarged for doors and windows

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 375

same," Doctor Fewkes writes me. " Russell trans
lates the old chief's name Morning Blue, which is the
same as my Morning Green. I have no doubt Morn
ing Glow is also correct, no doubt nearer the Indian
idea which refers to sun-god. This chief was the son
of the Sun by a maid, as was also Tcuhu-Montezuma,
a sun-god who, legends say, built Casa Grande."

Whatever its origin, the community was already
in ruins when the Spaniards first found it. Kino iden
tified it as the ruin which Fray Marcos saw in 1539
and called Chichilticalli, and which Coronado passed
in 1540. The early Spanish historians believed it an
ancestral settlement of the Aztecs.

Its formal discovery followed a century and a half
later. Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, governor
of Sonora, had directed his nephew, Lieutenant Juan
Mateo Mange, to conduct a group of missionaries into
the desert, where Mange heard rumors from the natives
of a fine group of ruins on the banks of a river which
flowed west. He reported this to Father Eusebio
Francisco Kino, the fearless and famous Jesuit mis
sionary among the Indians from 1687 to 1711; in No
vember, 1694, Kino searched for the ruins, found them,
and said mass within the walls of the Casa Grande.

This splendid ruin is built of a natural concrete
called culeche. The external walls are rough, but are
smoothly plastered within, showing the marks of hu
man hands. Two pairs of small holes in the walls
opposite others in the central room have occasioned
much speculation. Two look east and west; the others,

376 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

also on opposite walls, look north and south. Some
persons conjecture that observations were made through
them of the solstices, and perhaps of some star, to
establish the seasons for these primitive people. "The
foundation for this unwarranted hypothesis," Doctor
Fewkes writes, "is probably a statement in a manu
script by Father Font in 1775, that the 'Prince,'
'chief of Casa Grande, looked through openings in
the east and west walls 'on the sun as it rose and set,
to salute it.J The openings should not be confused
with smaller holes made in the walls for placing iron
rods to support the walls by contractors when the ruin
was repaired."

TUMACACORI NATIONAL MONUMENT

One of the best-preserved ruins of one of the finest
missions which Spanish priests established in the des
ert of the extreme south of Arizona is protected under
the name of the Tumacacori National Monument. It
is fifty-seven miles south of Tucson, near the Mexican
border. The outlying country probably possessed a
large native population.

The ruins are most impressive, consisting of the
walls and tower of an old church building, the walls
of a mortuary chapel at the north end of the church,
and a surrounding court with adobe walls six feet high.
These, like all the Spanish missions, were built by In
dian converts cinder the direction of priests, for the
Spanish invaders performed no manual labor. The
walls of the church are six feet thick and plastered

From a photograph by T. H. Bate

MONTEZUMA CASTLE

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 377

within. The belfry and the altar-dome are of burned
brick, the only example of brick construction among
the early Spanish missions. There is a fine arched
doorway.

For many reasons, this splendid church is well
worth a visit. It was founded and built about 1688
by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, and was known as
the Mission San Cayetano de Tumacacori. About
1769 the Franciscans assumed charge, and repaired
and elaborated the structure. They maintained it for
about sixty years, until the Apache Indians laid siege
and finally captured it, driving out the priests and dis
persing the Papagos. About 1850 it was found by
Americans in its present condition.

NAVAJO NATIONAL MONUMENT

The boundary-line which divides Utah from Ari
zona divides the most gorgeous expression of the great
American desert region. From the Mesa Verde Na
tional Park on the east to Zion National Monument on
the west, from the Natural Bridges on the north to
the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert on the
south, the country glows with golden sands and crim
son mesas, a wilderness of amazing and impossible
contours and indescribable charm.

Within this region, in the extreme north of Ari
zona, lie the ruins of three neighboring pueblos. Rich
ard Wetherill, who was one of the discoverers of the
famous cliff-cities of the Mesa Verde, was one of the
party which found the Kit Siel (Broken Pottery) ruin

378 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

in 1894 within a long crescent-shaped cave in the
side of a glowing red sandstone cliff; in 1908, upon
information given by a Navajo Indian, John Wetherill,
Professor Byron Gumming, and Neil Judd located Be-
tatakin (Hillside House) ruin within a crescent-shaped
cavity in the side of a small red canyon. Twenty
miles west of Betatakin is a small ruin known as In
scription House upon whose walls is a carved inscrip
tion supposed to have been made by Spanish explorers
who visited them in 1661.

While these ruins show no features materially
differing from those of hundreds of other more accessi
ble pueblo ruins, they possess quite extraordinary
beauty because of their romantic location in cliffs of
striking color in a region of mysterious charm.

But the Indian civilization of our southwest be
gan very many centuries before the arrival of the
Spaniard, who found, besides the innumerable pueblos
which were crowded with busy occupants, hundreds
of pueblos which had been deserted by their builders,
some of them for centuries, and which lay even then
in ruins.

The desertion of so many pueblos with abundant
pottery and other evidences of active living is one of
the mysteries of this prehistoric civilization. No doubt,
with the failure of water-supplies and other changing
physical conditions, occasionally communities sought

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 379

better living in other localities, but it is certain that
many of these desertions resulted from the raids of
the wandering predatory tribes of the plains, the
Querechos of Bandelier's records, but usually mentioned
by him and others by the modern name of Apaches.
These fierce bands continually sought to possess them
selves of the stores of food and clothing to be found in
the prosperous pueblos. The utmost cruelties of the
Spanish invaders who, after all, were ruthless only in
pursuit of gold, and, when this was lacking, tolerant
and even kindly in their treatment of the natives,
were nothing compared to the atrocities of these Apache
Indians, who gloried in conquest.

Of the ruins of pueblos which were not identified
with Spanish occupation, six have been conserved as
national monuments.

THE BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT

Many centuries before the coming of the Spaniards,
a deep gorge on the eastern slope of the Sierra de los
Valles, eighteen miles west of Santa Fe, New Mexico,
was the home of a people living in caves which they
hollowed by enlarging erosional openings in the soft
volcanic sides of nearly perpendicular cliffs. The
work was done with pains and skill. A small entrance,
sometimes from the valley floor, sometimes reached
by ladder, opened into a roomy apartment which in
many cases consisted of several connecting rooms.
These apartments were set in tiers or stories, as in a
modern flat-house. There were often two, sometimes

380 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

three, floors. They occurred in groups, probably rep
resenting families or clans, and some of these groups
numbered hundreds. Seen to-day, the cliff-side sug
gests not so much the modern apartment-house, of
which it was in a way the prehistoric prototype, as a
gigantic pigeon-house.

In time these Indians emerged from the cliff and
built a great semicircular pueblo up the valley, sur
rounded by smaller habitations. Other pueblos, prob
ably still later in origin, were built upon surrounding
mesas. All these habitations were abandoned perhaps
centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The
gorge is known as the Rito de la Frijoles, which is the
Spanish name of the clear mountain-stream which
flows through it. Since 1916 it has been known as the
Bandelier National Monument, after the late Adolf
Francis Bandelier, the distinguished archaeologist of
the southwest.

The valley is a place of beauty. It is six miles
long and nowhere broader than half a mile; its entrance
scarcely admits two persons abreast. Its southern
wall is the slope of a tumbled mesa, its northern wall
the vertical cliff of white and yellowish pumice in which
the caves were dug. The walls rise in crags and pin
nacles many hundreds of feet. Willows, cottonwoods,
cherries, and elders grow in thickets along the stream-
side, and cactus decorates the wastes. It is reached
by automobile from Santa Fe.

This national monument lies within a large irregu
lar area which has been suggested for a national park be-

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 381

cause of the many interesting remains which it encloses.
The Cliff Cities National Park, when it finally comes
into existence, will include among its exhibits a con
siderable group of prehistoric shrines of great value and
unusual popular interest.

"The Indians of to-day," writes William Boone
Douglass, "guard with great tenacity the secrets of
their shrines. Even when the locations have been
found they will deny their existence, plead ignorance
of their meaning, or refuse to discuss the subject in
any form." Nevertheless, they claim direct descent
from the prehistoric shrine-builders, many of whose
shrines are here found among others of later origin.

CHACO CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT

For fourteen miles, both sides of a New Mexican
canyon sixty-five miles equidistant from Farmington
and Gallup are lined with the ruins of very large and
prosperous colonies of prehistoric people. Most of
the buildings were pueblos, many of them containing
between fifty and a hundred rooms; one, known to-day
as Pueblo Bonito, must have contained twelve hun
dred rooms.

These ruins lie in their original desolation; little
excavation, and no restoration has yet been done.
Chaco Canyon must have been the centre of a very
large population. For miles in all directions, par
ticularly westward, pueblos are grouped as suburbs
group near cities of to-day.

It is not surprising that so populous a desert neigh-

382 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

borhood required extensive systems of irrigation. One
of these is so well preserved that little more than the
repair of a dam would be necessary to make it again
effective.

MONTEZUMA CASTLE NATIONAL MONUMENT

Small though it is, Montezuma Castle is justly
one of the most celebrated prehistoric ruins in America.
Its charming proportions, and particularly its com
manding position in the face of a lofty precipice, make
it a spectacle never to be forgotten. It is fifty-four
miles from Prescott, Arizona.

This structure was a communal house which orig
inally contained twenty-five rooms. The protection
of the dry climate and of the shallow cave in which it
stands has well preserved it these many centuries.
Most of the rooms are in good condition. The timbers,
which plainly show the hacking of the dull primeval
stone axes, are among its most interesting exhibits.
The building is crescent-shaped, sixty feet in width
and about fifty feet high. It is five stories high, but
the fifth story is invisible from the front because of
the high stone wall of the facade. The cliff forms the
back wall of the structure.

Montezuma's Castle is extremely old. Its ma
terial is soft calcareous stone, and nothing but its shel
tered position could have preserved it. There are
many ruined dwellings in the neighborhood.

HISTORIC MONUMENTS 383

TONTO NATIONAL MONUMENT

Four miles east of the Roosevelt Dam and eighty
miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, are two small groups
of cliff -dwellings which together form the Tonto Na
tional Monument. The southern group occupies a
cliff cavern a hundred and twenty-five feet across.
The masonry is above the average. The ceilings of
the lower rooms are constructed of logs laid length
wise, upon which a layer of fibre serves as the founda
tion for the four-inch adobe floor of the chamber
overhead.

There are hundreds of cliff-dwellings which ex
ceed this in charm and interest, but its nearness to an
attraction like the Roosevelt Dam and glimpses of
it which the traveller catches as he speeds over the
Apache Trail make it invaluable as a tourist exhibit.
Thousands who are unable to undertake the long and
often arduous journeys by trail to the greater ruins,
can here get definite ideas and a hint of the real flavor
of prehistoric civilization in America.

WALNUT CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT

Thirty cliff-dwellings cling to the sides of pic
turesque Walnut Canyon, eight miles from Flagstaff,
Arizona. They are excellently preserved. The largest
contains eight rooms. The canyon possesses unusual
beauty because of the thickets of locust which fringe
the trail down from the rim. One climbs down lad
ders to occasional ruins which otherwise are inacces-

384 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

sible. Because of its nearness to Flagstaff several
thousand persons visit this reservation yearly.

GILA CLIFFS NATIONAL MONUMENT

Fifty miles northeast of Silver City, New Mexico,
a deep rough canyon in the west fork of the Gila River
contains a group of four cliff -dwellings in a fair state
of preservation. They lie in cavities in the base of
an overhanging cliff of grayish-yellow volcanic rock
which at one time apparently were closed by protect
ing walls. When discovered by prospectors and
hunters about 1870, many sandals, baskets, spears,
and cooking utensils were found strewn on the floors.
Corn-cobs are all that vandals have left.

XIX

DESERT SPECTACLES

THE American desert, to eyes attuned, is charged
with beauty. Few who see it from the car-win
dow find it attractive; most travellers quickly lose in
terest in its repetitions and turn back to their novels.
A little intimacy changes this attitude. Live a little
with the desert. See it in its varied moods — for every
hour it changes; see it at sunrise, at midday, at sun
set, in the ghostly night, by moonlight. Observe its
life — for it is full of life; its amazing vegetation; its
varied outline. Drink in its atmosphere, its history,
its tradition, its romance. Open your soul to its per
suading spirit. Then, insensibly but swiftly, its flavor
will enthrall your senses; it will possess you. And
once possessed, you are charmed for life. It will call
you again and again, as the sea calls the sailor and the
East its devotees.

This alluring region is represented in our national
parks system by reservations which display its range.
The Zion National Monument, the Grand Canyon, and
the Mesa Verde illustrate widely differing phases.
The historical monuments convey a sense of its ro
mance. There remain a few to complete the gamut

of its charms.

385

386 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE NATIONAL MONUMENT

Imagine a gray Navajo desert dotted with purple
sage; huge mesas, deep red, squared against the gray-
blue atmosphere of the horizon; pinnacles, spires,
shapes like monstrous bloody fangs, springing from the
sands; a floor as rough as stormy seas, heaped with
tumbled rocks, red, yellow, blue, green, grayish-white,
between which rise strange yellowish-green thorny
growths, cactus-like and unfamiliar; a pathless waste,
strewn with obsidian fragments, glaring in the noon
sun, more confusing than the crooked mazes of an an
cient Oriental city.

Imagine shapeless masses of colored sandstone,
unclimbable, barring the way; acres of polished mot
tled rock tilted at angles which defy crossing; unex
pected canyons whose deep, broken, red and yellow
precipices force long detours.

And everywhere color, color, color. It pervades
the glowing floor, the uprising edifices. The very air
palpitates with color, insistent, irresistible, indefinable.

This is the setting of the Rainbow Bridge.

Scarcely more than a hundred persons besides
Indians, they tell me, have seen this most entrancing
spectacle, perhaps, of all America. The way in is
long and difficult. There are only two or three who
know it, even of those who have been there more than
once, and the region has no inhabitants to point direc
tions among the confusing rocks. There is no water,
nor any friendly tree.

ROOSEVELT PARTY IN MONUMENT VALLEY

RAINBOW BRIDGE IN FULL PERSPECTIVE

DESERT SPECTACLES 387

The day's ride is wearying in the extreme in spite
of its fascinations. The objective is Navajo Moun
tain, which, strange spectacle in this desert waste, is
forested to its summit with yellow pine above a sur
rounding belt of juniper and pinyon, with a^pen and
willows, wild roses, Indian paint-brush, primrose, and
clematis in its lower valleys. Below, the multicolored
desert, deep cat with the canyons which carry off the
many little rivers.

Down one of these wild and highly colored desert
canyons among whose vivid tumbled rocks your horses
pick their course with difficulty, you suddenly see a
rainbow caught among the vivid bald rocks, a slender
arch so deliciously proportioned, so gracefully curved
among its sharp surroundings, that your eye fixes it
steadfastly and your heart bounds with relief; until
now you had not noticed the oppression of this angled,
spine-carpeted landscape.

From now on nothing else possesses you. The
eccentricity of the going constantly hides it, and each
reappearance brings again the joy of discovery. And
at last you reach it, dismount beside the small clear
stream which flows beneath it, approach reverently,
overwhelmed with a strange mingling of awe and
great elation. You stand beneath its enormous en
circling red and yellow arch and perceive that it is
the support which holds up the sky. It is long before
turbulent emotion permits the mind to analyze the
elements which compose its extraordinary beauty.

Dimensions mean little before spectacles like this.

388 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

To know that the span is two hundred and seventy-
eight feet may help realization at home, where it may
be laid out, staked and looked at; it exceeds a block
of Fifth Avenue in New York. To know that the
apex of the rainbow's curve is three hundred and nine
feet above your wondering eyes means nothing to you
there; but to those who know New York City it means
the height of the Flatiron Building built three stories
higher. Choose a building of equal height in your
own city, stand beside it and look up. Then imagine
it a gigantic monolithic arch of entrancing proportions
and fascinating curve, glowing in reds and yellows
which merge into each other insensibly and without
form or pattern. Imagine this fairy unreality out
lined, not against the murk which overlies cities, but
against a sky of desert clarity and color.

All natural bridges are created wholly by erosion.
This was carved from an outstanding spur of Navajo
sandstone which lay crosswise of the canyon. Orig
inally the stream struck full against this barrier, swung
sideways, and found its way around the spur's free
outer edge. The end was merely a matter of time.
Gradually but surely the stream, sand-laden in times of
flood, wore an ever-deepening hollow in the barrier.
Finally it wore it through and passed under what then
became a bridge. But meantime other agencies were
at work. The rocky wall above, alternately hot and
cold, as happens in high arid lands, detached curved,
flattened plates. Worn below by the stream, thinned
above by the destructive processes of wind and tern-

DESERT SPECTACLES 389

perature, the window enlarged. In time the Rainbow
Bridge evolved in all its glorious beauty. Not far away
is another natural bridge well advanced in the making.

The Rainbow Bridge was discovered in 1909 by
William Boone Douglass, Examiner of Surveys in the
General Land Office, Santa Fe. Following is an ab
stract of the government report covering the discovery:

"The information had come to Mr. Douglass
from a Paiute Indian, Mike's Boy, who later took the
name of Jim, employed as flagman in the survey of
the three great natural bridges of White Canyon.
Seeing the white man's appreciation of this form of
wind and water erosion, Jim told of a greater bridge
known only to himself and one other Indian, located on
the north side of the Navajo Mountain, in the Paiute
Indian reservation. Bending a twig of willow in
rainbow-shape, with its ends stuck in the ground, Jim
showed what his bridge looked like.

"An effort was made to reach the bridge in De
cember. Unfortunately Jim could not be located.
On reaching the Navajo trading-post, Oljato, nothing
was known of such a bridge, and the truth of Jim's
statement was questioned.

"The trip was abandoned until August of the
following year, when Mr. Douglass organized a second
party at Bluff, Utah, and under Jim's guidance, left
for the bridge. At Oljato the party was augmented
by Professor Cummings, and a party of college stu
dents, with John Wetherill as packer, who were ex
cavating ruins in the Navajo Indian Reservation. As

3QO THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

the uninhabited and unknown country of the bridge
was reached, travel became almost impossible. All
equipment, save what was absolutely indispensable,
was discarded. The whole country was a maze of
box canyons, as though some turbulent sea had sud
denly solidified in rock. Only at a few favored points
could the canyon walls be scaled even by man, and still
fewer where a horse might clamber. In the sloping
sandstone ledges footholds for the horses must be cut,
and even then they fell, until their loss seemed certain.
After many adventures the party arrived at 1 1 o'clock,
A. M., August 14, 1909.

"Jim had indeed made good. Silhouetted against
a turquoise sky was an arch of rainbow shape, so deli
cately proportioned that it seemed as if some great
sculptor had hewn it from the rock. Its span of 270
feet bridged a stream of clear, sparkling water, that
flowed 310 feet below its crest. The world's greatest
natural bridge had been found as Jim had described it.
Beneath it, an ancient altar bore witness to the fact
that it was a sacred shrine of those archaic people,
the builders of the weird and mysterious cliff-castles
seen in the Navajo National Monument.

"The crest of the bridge was reached by Mr.
Douglass and his three assistants, John R. English,
Jean F. Rogerson, and Daniel Perkins, by lowering
themselves with ropes to the south abutment, and
climbing its arch. Probably they were the first human
beings to reach it.

"No Indian name for the bridge was known, ex-

DESERT SPECTACLES 391

cept such descriptive generic terms as the Paiute 'The
space under a horse's belly between its fore and hind
legs/ or the 'Hole in the rock' (nonnezoshi) of the
Navajo, neither of which was deemed appropriate.
While the question of a name was still being debated,
there appeared in the sky, as if in answer, a beautiful
rainbow, the 'Barahoni' of the Paiutes.

"The suitability of the name was further demon
strated by a superstition of the Navajos. On the occa
sion of his second visit, the fall of the same year, Mr.
Douglass had as an assistant an old Navajo Indian
named White Horse, who, after passing under the
bridge, would not return, but climbed laboriously
around its end. On being pressed for an explanation,
he would arch his hand, and through it squint at the
sun, solemnly shaking his head. Later, through the
assistance of Mrs. John Wetherill, an experienced
Navajo linguist, Mr. Douglass learned that the forma
tions of the type of the bridge were symbolic rainbows,
or the sun's path, and one passing under could not re
turn, under penalty of death, without the utterance
of a certain prayer, which White Horse had forgotten.
The aged Navajo informant would not reveal the
prayer for fear of the ' Lightning Snake."'

If your return from Rainbow Bridge carries you
through Monument Valley with its miles of blazing
red structures, memory will file still another amazing
sensation. Some of its crimson monsters rise a thou
sand feet above the grassy plain.

392 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

NATURAL BRIDGES NATIONAL MONUMENT

Not many miles north of the Rainbow Bridge,
fifty miles from Monticello in southern Utah, in a
region not greatly dissimilar in outline, and only less
colorful, three natural bridges of large size have been
conserved under the title of the Natural Bridges Na
tional Monument. Here, west of the Mesa Verde,
the country is characterized by long, broad mesas,
sometimes crowned with stunted cedar forests, drop
ping suddenly into deep valleys. The erosion of many
thousands of centuries has ploughed the surface into
winding rock-strewn canyons, great and small. Three
of these canyons are crossed by bridges stream-cut
through the solid rock.

The largest, locally known as the Augusta Bridge,
is named Sipapu, Gate of Heaven. It is one of the
largest natural bridges in the world, measuring two
hundred and twenty-two feet in height, with a span of
two hundred and sixty-one feet. It is a graceful and
majestic structure, so proportioned and finished that
it is difficult, from some points of view, to believe it
the unplanned work of natural forces. One crosses it
on a level platform twenty-eight feet wide.

The other two, which are nearly its size, are found
within five miles. The Kachina, which means Guar
dian Spirit, is locally called the Caroline Bridge. The
Owachomo, meaning Rock Mound, is locally known
as the Edwin Bridge. The local names celebrate per
sons who visited them soon after they were first dis
covered by Emery Knowles in 1895.

DESERT SPECTACLES 393

They may be reached by horse and pack-train
from Monticello, or Bluff, Utah. One of the five sec
tions of the reservation conserves two large caves.

DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT

The Age of Reptile developed a wide variety of
monsters in the central regions of the continent from
Montana to the Gulf of Mexico. The dinosaurs of
the Triassic and Jurassic periods sometimes had gi
gantic size, the Brontosaurus attaining a length of
sixty feet or more. The femur of the Brachiosaurus
exceeded six feet; this must have been the greatest of
them all.

The greater dinosaurs were herbivorous. The
carnivorous species were not remarkable for size;
there were small leaping forms scarcely larger than
rabbits. The necessity for defense against the flesh-
eaters developed, in the smaller dinosaurs, extremely
heavy armor. The stegosaur carried huge plates upon
his curved back, suggesting a circular saw; his long
powerful tail was armed with sharp spikes, and must
have been a dangerous weapon. Dinosaurs roamed
all over what is now called our middle west.

In those days the central part of our land was
warm and swampy. Fresh- water lagoons and slug
gish streams were bordered by low forests of palms
and ferns; one must go to the tropics to find a corre
sponding landscape in our times. The waters abounded
in reptiles and fish. Huge winged reptiles flew from
cover to cover. The first birds were evolving from
reptilian forms.

394 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

The absorbing story of these times is written in
the rocks. The life forms were at their full when the
sands were laid which to-day is the wide-spread layer
of sandstone which geologists call the Morrison forma
tion. Erosion has exposed this sandstone in several
parts of the western United States, and many have
been the interesting glimpses it has afforded of that
strange period so many millions of years ago.

In the Uintah Basin of northwestern Utah, a region
of bad lands crossed by the Green River on its way to
the Colorado and the Grand Canyon, the Morrison
strata have been bent upward at an angle of sixty
degrees or more and then cut through, exposing their
entire depth. The country is extremely rough and
bare. Only in occasional widely separated bottoms
has irrigation made farming possible; elsewhere nothing
grows upon the bald hillsides.

Here, eighteen miles east of the town of Vernal,
eighty acres of the exposed Morrison strata were set
aside in 1915 as the Dinosaur National Monument.
These acres have already yielded a very large collec
tion of skeletons. Since 1908 the Carnegie Museum
of Pittsburgh has been gathering specimens of the
greatest importance. The only complete skeleton of
a dinosaur ever found was taken out in 1909. The
work of quarrying and removal is done with the ut
most care. The rock is chiselled away in thin layers,
as no one can tell when an invaluable relic may be
found. As fast as bones are detached, they are cov
ered with plaster of Paris and so wrapped that break-

DESERT SPECTACLES 395

age becomes impossible. Two years were required to
unearth the skeleton of a brontosaurus.

The extraordinary massing of fossil remains at
this point suggests that floods may have swept these
animals from a large area and lodged their bodies here,
where they were covered with sands. But it also is
possible that this spot was merely a favorite feeding-
ground. It may be that similarly rich deposits lie
hidden in many places in the wide-spread Morrison
sandstone which some day may be unearthed. The
bones of dinosaurs have been found in the Morrison
of Colorado near Boulder.

PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL MONUMENT

For a hundred and twenty-five or thirty miles
southwest of the Grand Canyon, the valley of the
Little Colorado River is known as the Painted Desert.
It is a narrow plain of Carboniferous and Triassic
marls, shales, sandstones, and conglomerates, abound
ing in fossils, the most arid part of Arizona; even the
river's lower reaches dry up for a part of each year.
But it is a palette of brilliant colors; it will be difficult
to name a tint or shade which is not vividly represented
in this gaudy floor and in the strata of the cliffs which
define its northern and eastern limits. Above and be
yond these cliffs lies that other amazing desert, the
Navajo country, the land of the Rainbow Bridge and
the Canyon de Chelly.

I have mentioned the Painted Desert because it
is shaped like a long narrow finger pointed straight

396 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

at the Petrified Forests lying just beyond its touch.
Here the country is also highly colored, but very dif
ferently. Maroon and tawny yellow are the prevail
ing tints of the marls, red and brown the colors of the
sandstones. There is a rolling sandy floor crisscrossed
with canyons in whose bottoms grow stunted cedars
and occasional cottonwoods. Upon this floor thou
sands of petrified logs are heaped in confusion. In
many places the strong suggestion is that of a log jam
left stranded by subsiding floods. Nearly all the logs
have broken into short lengths as cleanly cut as if
sawn, the result of succeeding heat and cold.

Areas of petrified wood are common in many parts
of the Navajo country and its surrounding deserts.
The larger areas are marked on the Geological Survey
maps, and many lesser areas are mentioned in reports.
There are references to rooted stumps. The three
groups in the Petrified Forest National Monument,
near the town of Adamana, Arizona, were chosen for
conservation because they are the largest and perhaps
the finest; at the time, the gorgeously colored logs
were being carried away in quantities to be cut up into
table-tops.

As a matter of fact, these are not forests. Most
of these trees grew upon levels seven hundred feet or
more higher than where they now lie and at unknown
distances; floods left them here.

The First Forest, which lies six miles south of
Adamana, contains thousands of broken lengths.
One unbroken log a hundred and eleven feet long

rr ,i / 41 , v

•A ^

THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARJZONjA 0 „' ', ; . \ - .

Showing the formation in colored strata. The logs seen on the ground grew upon a level seven

hundred feet higher ,' > .* • • ».• > '. • *i

PETRIFIED TRUNK FORMING A BRIDGE OVER A CANYON

The trunk is in feet long. The stone piers were built to preserve it

DESERT SPECTACLES 397

bridges a canyon forty-five feet wide, a remarkable
spectacle. In the Second Forest, which lies two miles
and a half south of that, and the Third Forest, which
is thirteen miles south of Adamana and eighteen miles
southeast of Holbrook, most of the trunks appear to
lie in their original positions. One which was mea
sured by Doctor G. H. Knowlton of the Smithsonian
Institution was more than seven feet in diameter and
a hundred and twenty feet long. He estimates the
average diameters at three or four feet, while lengths
vary from sixty to a hundred feet.

The coloring of the wood is variegated and bril
liant. "The state of mineralization in which most of
this wood exists," writes Professor Lester F. Ward,
paleobotanist, "almost places them among the gems
or precious stones. Not only are chalcedony, opals,
and agates found among them, but many approach the
condition of jasper and onyx." "The chemistry of
the process of petrifaction or silicification," writes
Doctor George P. Merrill, Curator of Geology in the
National Museum, "is not quite clear. Silica is ordi
narily looked upon as one of the most insoluble of sub
stances. It is nevertheless readily soluble in alkaline
solutions — i. e., solutions containing soda or potash.
It is probable that the solutions permeating these
buried logs were thus alkaline, and as the logs gradually
decayed their organic matter was replaced, molecule
by molecule, by silica. The brilliant red and other
colors are due to the small amount of iron and man
ganese deposited together with the silica, and super-

398 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

oxydized as the trunks are exposed to the air. The
most brilliant colors are therefore to be found on the
surface."

The trees are of several species. All those identi
fied by Doctor Knowlton were Araucaria, which do not
now live in the northern hemisphere. Doctor E. C.
Jeffrey, of Harvard, has described one genus unknown
elsewhere.

To get the Petrified Forest into full prospective
it is well to recall that these shales and sands were laid
in water, above whose surface the land raised many
times, only to sink again and accumulate new strata.
The plateau now has fifty-seven hundred feet of alti
tude.

"When it is known," writes Doctor Knowlton,
"that since the close of Triassic times probably more
than fifty thousand feet of sediments have been de
posited, it is seen that the age of the Triassic forests
of Arizona can only be reckoned in millions of years
— just how many it would be mere speculation to at
tempt to estimate. It is certain, also, that at one time
the strata containing these petrified logs were them
selves buried beneath thousands of feet of strata of
later ages, which have in places been worn away suffi
ciently to expose the tree-bearing beds. Undoubtedly
other forests as great or greater than those now exposed
lie buried beneath the later formations."

A very interesting small forest, not in the reser
vation, lies nine miles north of Adamana.

DESERT SPECTACLES 399

PAPAGO SAGUARO NATIONAL MONUMENT

The popular idea of a desert of dry drifting sand
unrelieved except at occasional oases by evidences of
life was born of our early geographies, which pictured
the Sahara as the desert type. Far different indeed
is our American desert, most of which has a few inches
of rainfall in the early spring and grows a peculiar
flora of remarkable individuality and beauty. The
creosote bush seen from the car-windows shelters a
few grasses which brown and die by summer, but help
to color the landscape the year around. Many low
flowering plants gladden the desert springtime, and
in the far south and particularly in the far southwest
are several varieties of cactus which attain great size.
The frequenter of the desert soon correlates its flora
with its other scenic elements and finds all rich and
beautiful.

In southwestern Arizona and along the southern
border of California this strange flora finds its fullest
expression. Here one enters a new fairy -land, a region
of stinging bushes and upstanding monsters lifting un
gainly arms to heaven. In 1914, to conserve one of
the many rich tracts of desert flora, President Wilson
created the Papago Saguaro National Monument a
few miles east of Phoenix, Arizona. Its two thousand
and fifty acres include fine examples of innumerable
desert species in fullest development.

Among these the cholla is at once one of the most
fascinating and the most exasperating. It belongs

400 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

to the prickly pear family, but there resemblance
ceases. It is a stocky bush two or three feet high
covered with balls of flattened powerful sharp-pointed
needles which will penetrate even a heavy shoe. In
November these fall, strewing the ground with spiny
indestructible weapons. There are many varieties of
chollas and all are decorative. The tree cholla grows
from seven to ten feet in height, a splendid showy
feature of the desert slopes, and the home, fortress,
and sure defense for all the birds who can find nest-
room behind its bristling breastwork.

The Cereus thurberi, the pipe-organ, or candela
brum cactus, as it is variously called, grows in thick
straight columns often clumped closely together, a
picturesque and beautiful creation. Groups range
from a few inches to many feet in height. One clump
of twenty-two stems has been reported, the largest
stem of which was twenty feet high and twenty-two
inches in diameter.

Another of picturesque appeal is the bisnaga or
barrel cactus, of which there are many species of many
sizes. Like all cacti, it absorbs water during the brief
wet season and stores it for future use. A specimen
the size of a flour-barrel can be made to yield a couple
of gallons of sweetish but refreshing water, whereby
many a life has been saved in the sandy wastes.

But the desert's chief exhibit is the giant saguaro,
the Cereus giganteus, from which the reservation got
its name. This stately cactus rises in a splendid green
column, accordion-plaited and decorated with star-

DESERT SPECTACLES 401

like clusters of spines upon the edges of the plaits.
The larger specimens grow as high as sixty or seventy
feet and throw out at intervals powerful branches
which bend sharply upward; sometimes there are as
many as eight or nine of these gigantic branches.

No towering fir or spreading oak carries a more
princely air. A forest of giant saguaro rising from a
painted desert far above the tangle of creosote-bush,
mesquite, cholla, bisnaga, and scores of other strange
growths of a land of strange attractions is a spectacle
to stir the blood and to remember for a lifetime.

COLORADO NATIONAL MONUMENT

On the desert border of far-western Colorado
near Grand Junction is a region of red sandstone
which the erosion of the ages has carved into innu
merable strange and grotesque shapes. Once a great
plain, then a group of mesas, now it has become a city
of grotesque monuments. Those who have seen the
Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs can imagine
it multiplied many times in size, grotesqueness, com
plexity, and area; such a vision will approximate the
Colorado National Monument. The two regions have
other relations in common, for as the Garden of the
Gods flanks the Rockies' eastern slopes and looks east
ward to the great plains, so does the Colorado National
Monument flank the Rockies' western desert. Both
are the disclosure by erosion of similar strata of red
sandstone which may have been more or less con-

402 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

tinuous before the great Rockies wrinkled, lifted, and
burst upward between them.

The rock monuments of this group are extremely
highly colored. They rise in several neighboring can
yons and some of them are of great height and fan
tastic design. One is a nearly circular column with a
diameter of a hundred feet at the base and a height
of more than four hundred feet.

Caves add to the attractions, and there are many
springs among the tangled growths of the canyon floors.
There are cedars and pinyon trees. The region abounds
in mule-deer and other wild animals.

CAPULIN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL MONUMENT

After the sea-bottom which is now our desert
southwest rose for the last time and became the lofty
plateau of to-day, many were the changes by which its
surface became modified. Chief of these was the
erosion which has washed its levels thousands of feet
below its potential altitude and carved it so remark
ably. But it also became a field of wide-spread vol
canic activity, and lavas and obsidians are constantly
encountered among its gravels, sands, and shales.
Many also are the cones of dead volcanoes.

Capulin Mountain in northeastern New Mexico
near the Colorado line is a very ancient volcano which
retains its shape in nearly perfect condition. It was
made a national monument for scientific reasons, but
it also happily rounds out the national parks' exhibit
of the influences which created our wonderful south-

DESERT SPECTACLES 403

west. Its crater cone is composed partly of lava flow,
partly of fine loose cinder, and partly of cemented vol
canic ash. It is nearly a perfect cone.

Capulin rises fifteen hundred feet from the plain
to an altitude of eight thousand feet. Its crater is
fifteen hundred feet across and seventy-five feet deep.
To complete the volcanic exhibit many blister cones
are found around its base. It is easily reached from
two railroads or by automobile.

THE MUIR WOODS AND OTHER NATIONAL
MONUMENTS

NATIONAL monuments which commemorate his
tory, conserve forests, and distinguish conspicu
ous examples of world-making dot other parts of the
United States besides the colorful southwest. Their
variety is great and the natural beauty of some of them
unsurpassed.

Their number should be much greater. Every
history-helping exploration of the early days, from
Cortreal's inspection of the upper Atlantic coast in
1501 and Ponce de Leon's exploration of Florida
eleven years later, from Cabrillo's skirting of the
Pacific coast in 1542 and Vancouver's entrance into
Puget Sound in 1792, including every early expedition
from north and south into the country now ours and
every exploration of the interior by our own people,
should be commemorated, not by a slab of bronze or
marble, but by a striking and appropriate area set
apart as a definite memorial of the history of this
nation's early beginnings.

These areas should be appropriately located upon
or overlooking some important or characteristic land
mark of the explorations or events which they com
memorated, and should have scenic importance suffi-

404

THE MUIR WOODS 405

cient to attract visitors and impress upon them the
stages of the progress of this land from a condition of
wilderness to settlement and civilization.

Nor should it end here. The country is richly en
dowed, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with exam
ples of Nature's amazing handicraft in the making of
this continent, the whole range of which should be
fully expressed in national reservations.

Besides these, examples of our northeastern for
ests, the pines of the southern Appalachians, the ever
glades of Florida, the tangled woodlands of the gulf,
and other typical forests which perchance may have
escaped the desolation of civilization, should be added
to the splendid forest reserves of the national parks of
the West, first-grown as Nature made them, forever to
remain untouched by the axe.

Thus will the national parks system become the
real national museum for to-day and forever.

There follows a brief catalogue of the slender and
altogether fortuitous beginnings of such an exhibit.

MUIR WOODS NATIONAL MONUMENT

One of the last remaining stands of original red
wood forest easily accessible to the visitor is the Muir
Woods in California. It occupies a picturesque canyon
on the slope of Mount Tamalpais, north of the Golden
Gate and opposite San Francisco, from which it is
comfortably reached by ferry and railroad. It was
rescued from the axe by William Kent of California,
who, jointly with Mrs. Kent, gave it to the nation as

4o6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

an exhibit of the splendid forest which once crowded
the shores of San Francisco Bay. It is named after
John Muir, to whom this grove was a favorite retreat
for many years.

It exhibits many noble specimens of the California
redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, cousin of the giant
sequoia. Some of them attain a height of three hun
dred feet, with a diameter exceeding eighteen feet.
They stand usually in clusters, or family groups, their
stems erect as pillars, their crowns joined in a lofty
roof, rustling in the Pacific winds, musical with the
songs of birds. Not even in the giant sequoia groves
of the Sierra have I found any spot more cathedral-
like than this. Its floor is brown and sweet-smelling,
its aisles outlined by the tread of generations of wor
shippers. Its naves, transepts, alcoves, and sanctu
aries are still and dim, yet filled mysteriously with
light.

The Muir Woods is a grove of noble redwoods,
but it is much more. Apart from its main passages,
in alcove, gateway, and outlying precinct it is an ex
hibit of the rich Calif ornian coast forest. The Douglas
fir here reaches stately proportions. Many of the
western oaks display their manifold picturesqueness.
A hundred lesser trees and shrubs add their grace and
variety. The forest is typical and complete. Though
small in scope it is not a remnant but naturally blends
into its surroundings. The shaded north hill slopes
carry the great trees to the ridge line; the southern
slope exhibits the struggle for precedence with the

From a photograph by Tibbitts

CATHEDRAL ISLE OF THE MUIR WOODS

THE MUIR WOODS 407

mountain shrubs. At the lower end one bursts out
into the grass country and the open hills. Every
feature of the loveliest of all forests is at hand: the
valley floor with its miniature trout-stream overhung
with fragrant azaleas; the brown carpet interwoven
with azaleas and violets. There is the cool decoration
of many ferns.

The straight-growing redwoods compel a change
of habit in the trees that would struggle toward a view
of the sky. Mountain-oaks and madrona are straight-
trunked and clear of lower branches. There is rivalry
of the strong and protection for the weak.

The grove is, in truth, a complete expression in
little of Nature's forest plan. The characteristics of
the greater redwood forests which require weeks or
months to compass and careful correlation to bring
into perspective, here are exhibited within the rambling
of a day. The Muir Woods is an entity. Its meadow
borders, its dark ravines, its valley floor, its slopes and
hilltops, all show fullest luxuriance and perfect pro
portion. The struggle of the greater trees to climb the
hills is exemplified as fully as in the great exhibits
of the north, which spread over many miles of hill
slope; here one may see its range in half an hour.

The coloring, too, is rich. The rusty foliage and
bark, the brighter green of the shrubs, the brown car
pet, the opal light, stirs the spirit. The powerful in
dividuality of many of its trees is the source of never-
ending pleasure. There is a redwood upon the West
Fork which has no living base, but feeds, vampire-

4o8 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

like, through another's veins; or, if you prefer the
figure of family dependence so strikingly exemplified
in these woods, has been rescued from destruction by
a brother. The base of this tree has been completely
girdled by fire. Impossible to draw subsistence from
below, it stands up from a burned, naked, slender
foundation. But another tree fell against it twenty-
five or thirty feet above the ground, in some far past
storm, and lost its top; this tree pours its sap into the
veins of the other to support its noble top. The twin
cripples have become a single healthy tree.

One of the most striking exhibits of the Muir
Woods is its tangle of California laurel. Even in its
deepest recesses, the bays, as they are commonly
called, reach great size. They sprawl in all directions,
bend at sharp angles, make great loops to enter the
soil and root again; sometimes they cross each other
and join their trunks; in one instance, at least, a large
crownless trunk has bent and entered head first the
stem of still a larger tree.

There are greater stands of virgin redwoods in
the northern wilderness of California which the ruth
less lumberman has not yet reached but is approaching
fast; these are inland stands of giants, crowded like
battalions. But there is no other Muir Woods, with
its miniature perfection.

DEVIL'S POSTPILE NATIONAL MONUMENT

Southeast of craggy Lyell, mountain climax and
eastern outpost of the Yosemite National Park, the

THE MUIR WOODS 409

Muir Trail follows the extravagantly beautiful begin
nings of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River
through a region of myriad waters and snow-flecked
mountains. Banner Peak, Ritter Mountain, Thou
sand Island Lake, Volcanic Ridge, Shadow Lake —
national park scenery in its noblest expression, but not
yet national park.

A score of miles from Ly ell, the trail follows the
river into a volcanic bottom from whose forest rises the
splendid group of pentagonal basaltic columns which
was made a national monument in 1911 under the title
of the Devil's Postpile. Those who know the famous
Giant's Causeway of the Irish coast will know it in
kind, but not in beauty.

The enormous uplift which created the Sierra was
accompanied on both its slopes by extensive volcanic
eruptions, the remains of which are frequently visible
to the traveller. The huge basaltic crystals of the
Devil's Postpile were a product of this volcanic out
pouring; they formed deep within the hot masses
which poured over the region for miles around. Their
upper ends have become exposed by the erosion of the
ages by which the cinder soil and softer rock around
them have been worn away.

The trail traveller comes suddenly upon this
splendid group. It is elevated, as if it were the front
of a small ridge, its posts standing on end, side by
side, in close formation. Below it, covering the front
of the ridge down to the line of the trail, is an enor
mous talus mass of broken pieces. The appropriate-

4io THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ness of the name strikes one at the first glance. This
is really a postpile, every post carefully hewn to pat
tern, all of nearly equal length. The talus heap be
low suggests that his Satanic Majesty was utilizing it
also as a woodpile, and had sawn many of the posts
into lengths to fit the furnaces which we have been
taught that he keeps hot for the wicked.

Certainly it is a beautiful, interesting, and even
an imposing spectacle. One also thinks of it as a
gigantic organ, whose many hundred pipes rise many
feet in air. Its lofty position, seen from the view
point of the trail, is one of dignity; it overlooks the
pines and firs surrounding the clearing in which the
observer stands. The trees on the higher level scarcely
overtop it; in part, it is outlined against the sky.

"The Devil's Postpile/7 writes Professor Joseph
N. LeConte, Muir's successor as the prophet of the
Sierra, "is a wonderful cliff of columnar basalt, facing
the river. The columns are quite perfect prisms,
nearly vertical and fitted together like the cells of a
honeycomb. Most of the prisms are pentagonal,
though some are of four or six sides. The standing
columns are about two feet in diameter and forty feet
high. At the base of the cliff is an enormous basalt
structure, but, wherever the bed-rock is exposed be
neath the pumice covering, the same formation can
be seen."

An error in the proclamation papers made the
official title of this monument the Devil Postpile, and
thus it must legally appear in all official documents.

THE MUIR WOODS 411

The reservation also includes the Rainbow Fall
of the San Juan River, one of the most beautiful
waterfalls of the sub-Sierra region, besides soda springs
and hot springs. This entire reservation was orig
inally included in the Yosemite National Park, but
was cut out by an unappreciative committee appointed
to revise boundaries. It is to be hoped that Congress
will soon restore it to its rightful status.

DEVIL'S TOWER NATIONAL MONUMENT

A structure similar in nature to the Devil's Post-
pile, but vastly greater in size and sensational quality,
forms one of the most striking natural spectacles east
of the Rocky Mountains. The Devil's Tower is unique.
It rises with extreme abruptness from the rough
Wyoming levels just west of the Black Hills. It is
on the banks of the Belle Fourche River, which later,
encircling the Black Hills around the north, finds its
way into the Big Cheyenne and the Missouri.

This extraordinary tower emerges from a rounded
forested hill of sedimentary rock which rises six hun
dred feet above the plain; from the top of that the tower
rises six hundred feet still higher. It is visible for a
hundred miles or more in every direction. Before the
coming of the white man it was the landmark of the
Indians. Later it served a useful purpose in guiding
the early explorers.

To-day it is the point which draws the eye for many
miles. The visitor approaching by automobile sees it
hours away, and its growth upon the horizon as he

4i2 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

approaches is not his least memorable experience.
It has the effect at a distance of an enormous up-
pointing finger which has been amputated just below
the middle joint. When near enough to enable one
to distinguish the upright flutings formed by its
closely joined pentagonal basaltic prisms, the illusion
vanishes. These, bending inward from a flaring base,
straighten and become nearly perpendicular as they
rise. Now, one may fancy it the stump of a tree more
than a hundred feet in diameter whose top imagination
sees piercing the low clouds. But close by, all similes
become futile; then the Devil's Tower can be likened
to nothing but itself.

This column is the core of a volcanic formation
which doubtless once had a considerably larger circum
ference. At its base lies an immense talus of broken
columns which the loosening frosts and the winter
gales are constantly increasing; the process has been
going on for untold thousands of years, during which
the softer rock of the surrounding plains has been eroded
to its present level.

One may climb the hill and the talus. The column
itself cannot be climbed except by means of special
apparatus. Its top is nearly flat and elliptical, with
a diameter varying from sixty to a hundred feet.

PINNACLES NATIONAL MONUMENT

Forty miles as the crow flies east of Monterey,
California, in a spur of the low Coast Range, is a
region which erosion has carved into many fantastic

THE MUIR WOODS 413

shapes. Because of its crowded pointed rocks, it has
been set apart under the title of the Pinnacles National
Monument. For more than a century and a quarter
it was known as Vancouver's Pinnacles because the
great explorer visited it while his ships lay at anchor
in Monterey Bay, and afterward described it in his
"Voyages and Discoveries." It is unfortunate that
the historical allusion was lost when it became a
national reservation.

Two deep gorges, bordered by fantastic walls
six hundred to a thousand feet high, and a broad semi
circular, flower-grown amphitheatre, constitute the
central feature. Deep and narrow tributary gorges
furnish many of the curious and intricate forms which
for many years have made the spot popular among
sightseers. Rock masses have fallen upon the side
walls of several of these lesser gorges, converting them
into picturesque winding tunnels and changing deep
alcoves into caves which require candles to see.

It is a region of very unusual interest and charm.

SHOSHONE CAVERN NATIONAL MONUMENT

On the way to the Yellowstone National Park by
way of the Wyoming entrance at Cody, and three
miles east of the great Shoshone Dam, a limestone cave
has been set apart under the title of the Shoshone
Cavern National Monument. The way in is rough
and precipitous and, after entering the cave, a descent
by rope is necessary to reach the chambers of unusual
beauty. One may then journey for more than a mile

4i4 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

through galleries some of which are heavily incrusted
with crystals.

LEWIS AND CLARK CAVERN NATIONAL MONUMENT

Approaching the crest of the Rockies on the
Northern Pacific Railroad, the Lewis and Clark Cav
ern is passed fifty miles before reaching Butte. Its
entrance is perched thirteen hundred feet above the
broad valley of the Jefferson River, which the cele
brated explorers followed on their westward journey;
it overlooks fifty miles of their course.

The cavern, which has the usual characteristics
of a limestone cave, slopes sharply back from its main
entrance, following the dip of the strata. Some of its
vaults are decorated in great splendor. The depreda
tions of vandals were so damaging that in 1916 its
entrance was closed by an iron gate.

This cavern is the only memorial of the Lewis and
Clark expedition in the national parks system; there
is no record that the explorers entered it or knew of
its existence.

Two hundred and thirty miles east of the Cavern,
Clark inscribed his name and the date, July 25, 1806,
upon the face of a prominent butte known as Pompey's
Pillar. This would have been a far more appropriate
monument to the most important of American explora
tions than the limestone cave. In fact, the Department
of the Interior once attempted to have it proclaimed a
national monument; the fact that it lay within an
Indian allotment prevented. The entire course of

THE MUIR WOODS 415

this great expedition should be marked at significant
points by appropriate national monuments.

WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARK

In the southwestern corner of South Dakota, on
the outskirts of the Black Hills, is one of the most in
teresting limestone caverns of the country. It was
named Wind Cave because, with the changes of tem
perature during the day, strong currents of wind blow
alternately into and out of its mouth. It has many
long passages and fine chambers gorgeously decorated.
It is a popular resort.

The United States Biological Survey maintains a
game-preserve.

JEWEL CAVE NATIONAL MONUMENT

Northwest of Wind Cave, thirteen miles west and
south of Custer, South Dakota boasts another lime
stone cavern of peculiar beauty, through whose en
trance also the wind plays pranks. It is called Jewel
Cave because many of its crystals are tinted in various
colors, often very brilliantly. Under torchlight the
effect is remarkable.

Connecting chambers have been explored for more
than three miles, and there is much of it yet unknown.

OREGON CAVES NATIONAL MONUMENT

In the far southwestern corner of Oregon, about
thirty miles south of Grant's Pass, upon slopes of coast
mountains and at an altitude of four thousand feet, is

4i6 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

a group of large limestone caves which have been set
apart by presidential proclamation under the title of
the Oregon Caves National Monument. Locally they
are better known as the Marble Halls of Oregon.

There are two entrances at different levels, the
passages and chambers following the dip of the strata.
A considerable stream, the outlet of the waters which
dissolved these caves in the solid limestone, passes
through. The wall decorations, and, in some of the
chambers, the stalagmites and stalactites, are exceed
ingly fine. The vaults and passages are unusually
large. There is one chamber twenty-five feet across
whose ceiling is believed to be two hundred feet high.

MOUNT OLYMPUS NATIONAL MONUMENT

For sixty miles or more east and west across the
Olympian Peninsula, which is the forested north
western corner of Washington and the United States
between Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, stretch
the Olympian Mountains. The country is a rugged
wilderness of tumbled ranges, grown with magnificent
forests above which rise snowy and glaciered sum
mits. Its climax is Mount Olympus, eight thousand
one hundred feet in altitude, rising about twenty-five
miles equidistant from the Strait of Juan de Fuca
upon the north and the Pacific Ocean upon the west.

The entire peninsula is extremely wild. It is
skirted by a road along its eastern and part of its
northern edges, connecting the water-front towns.
Access to the mountain is by arduous trail. The reser-

THE MUIR WOODS 417

vation contains nine hundred and fifty square miles.
Although possessing unusual scenic beauty, it was re
served for the purpose of protecting the Olympic elk,
a species peculiar to the region. Deer and other wild
animals also are abundant.

WHEELER NATIONAL MONUMENT

High under the Continental Divide in south
western Colorado near Creede, a valley of high alti
tude, grotesquely eroded in tufa, rhyolite, and other
volcanic rock, is named the Wheeler National Monu
ment in honor of Captain George Montague Wheeler,
who conducted geographical explorations between 1869
and 1879. Its deep canyons are bordered by lofty
pinnacles of rock. It is believed that General John
C. Fremont here met the disaster which drove back
his exploring-party of 1848, fragments of harness and
camp equipment and skeletons of mules having been
found.

VERENDRYE NATIONAL MONUMENT

The first exploration of the northern United States
east of the Rocky Mountains is commemorated by
the Verendrye National Monument at the Old Crossing
of the Missouri River in North Dakota. Here rises
Crowhigh Butte, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reser
vation, an eminence commanding a wide view in every
direction.

Verendrye, the celebrated French explorer, started
from the north shore of Lake Superior about 1740 and

4i8 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

passed westward and southward into the regions of
the great plains. He or his sons, for the records of
their journeys are confusing, passed westward into
Montana along a course which Lewis and Clark paral
leled in 1806, swung southward in the neighborhood of
Fort Ben ton, and skirted the Rockies nearly to the
middle of Wyoming, passing within a couple of hundred
miles of the Yellowstone National Park.

Crowhigh Butte is supposed to have given the
Verendryes their first extensive view of the upper
Missouri. The butte was long a landmark to guide
early settlers to Old Crossing.

SULLY'S HILL NATIONAL PARK

Congress created the Sully 's Hill National Park
in North Dakota in 1904 in response to a local de
mand. Its hills and meadows constitute a museum of
practically the entire flora of the State. The United
States Biological Survey maintains there a wild-an
imal preserve for elk, bison, antelope, and other animals
representative of the northern plains.

SITKA NATIONAL MONUMENT

On Baranoff Island, upon the southeastern shore
of Alaska, is a reservation known as the Sitka National
Monument which commemorates an important epi
sode in the early history of Alaska. On this tract,
which lies within a mile of the steamboat-landing at
Sitka, formerly stood the village of the Kik-Siti In
dians who, in 1802, attacked the settlement of Sitka

THE MUIR WOODS 419

and massacred the Russians who had established it.
Two years later the Russians under Baranoff recovered
the settlement from the Indians, contrary to the active
opposition of Great Britain, and established the title
which they afterward transferred to the United States.
Graves of some of those who fell in the later battle
may be seen.

The reservation is also a fine exhibit of the forest
and flora of the Alexander Archipelago. Sixteen totem-
poles remain from the old native days.

OLD KASAAN NATIONAL MONUMENT

Remains of the rapidly passing native life of the
Alexander Archipelago on the southeast coast of Alaska
are conserved in the Old Kasaan National Monument
on the east shore of Prince of Wales Island. The vil
lage of Old Kasaan, occupied for many years by the
Hydah tribe and abandoned a decade or more ago,
contains several community houses of split timber,
each of which consists of a single room with a common
fireplace in the middle under a smoke-hole in the centre
of the roof. Cedar sleeping-booths, each the size of an
ordinary piano-box, are built around the wall.

The monument also possesses fifty totem-poles,
carved and richly colored.

Of the thirty-six national monuments, twenty-
four are administered by the National Parks Service,
ten by the Department of Agriculture, and two . by
the War Department. Congress made the assign-

420 THE BOOK OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

ments to the Department of Agriculture on the theory
that, as these monuments occurred in forests, they could
be more cheaply administered by the Forest Service;
but, as many of the other monuments and nearly all
the national parks also occur in forests, the logic is
not apparent, and these monuments suffer from dis-
association with the impetus and machinery of the
National Park Service.

The Big Hole Battlefield National Monument,
about fifty-five miles southwest of Butte, Montana,
was assigned to the War Department because a battle
took place there in 1877 between a small force of
United States troops and a large force of Indians.

/'fbprottiy Lake
'/ ^_.fy*nt«jrMtn

N /\

MAP OF YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA

^Baid Crater

Desert

PUMICE

Timber Crater

c
Tone

^ Oas/3 Spr
^Oasis Suite

OESEtrr

TO KLAMATH FALLS

CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, OREGON

Boundary Line
— — "^Boundary Line
of proposed

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

The proposed Jackson Hole addition is enclosed by a broken line south of boundary

; GLACIER* NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA

MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO

TO SALT LAKE crry^
»/'

A UTO STAGE L INE

LUND TO THE
Z/O/V CANYON IOOM/LES

\\Beaver
w SALT LAKE c/rr

2 16 MILES
Fre

'•TO SALT LAKE
iCITY 254 MILK
S'MARYSVALE 4

D Gaso/ine and o/'/s can be ob
tained af fowns marked thus.

GRAND CANYON

(NORTH PI M)

63 MILES

ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT, UTAH

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Full text of "The book of the national parks, by Robert Sterling Yard"

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